The Last Boomboxes 

Seeing the muppets return is like hearing from an old friend. Always a pleasure

I bought a JVC boom box back in 2001. It died in 2022. It has been on every vacation, every year since I bought it, so we held a wake when it died. It will be missed.

Couple of months ago I repaired a Hitachi boombox made in 1977. Dropped in a bluetooth cassette adapters, loaded it with D-cells, and proceeded to blow my friends' minds with the sound quality. It just sounds so much better than a normal bluebooth speaker, and has a way cooler stage presence with its working VU meters, dials and switches.

This thing looks designed for exercise classes and maybe dance classes. This makes a lot of features make sense, including the reliance on the remote and the fairly plain colour language

Oh WOW! I had a JVC Kaboom box back in the year 2000. It looked basically just like this and cost me $300 back then. The model back then had a tape player and guitar/mic input. It didn't have a DAB or the lights though. They've been updating this basic design since the 90s. This is an amazing thing to see on a Sunday morning 24 years later.

Always a great day when you get a mention in a Techmoan video. Many thanks. ‘Not Just Garden Variety’ is quite a bass-test, it’s one of the ones I use myself when testing new speakers and of course, no content-match. That’s the second track of mine you played, for those reading the comments. Thank you sir.

i'll never forget the scene in the James Bond film 'The living Daylights' where a Boombox turns into a rocket launcher. After it blows up a wall M turns to Bond and says "Something we're making for the Americans. It's called a ghetto blaster."

14:09 rolling shutter effect due to the bass vibrations. That thing is not kidding when it says bass.

This was standard dance studio gear because it had a mic input, was very loud and could be locked in a cupboard. We had quite a few of these, but ours had no flashy lights and no dab radio. Thanks for the memory as usual!

It’s weird that we have advanced technology and a mono Bluetooth speaker with only streaming capability is the gold standard for portable audio

If there was ever a feature missing from the original boom boxes, it was the unintelligible PA announcement echo function

Puppets AND the kitty make an appearance?! This made my day! 😁❤🐈

Nearly 42 years after it was first released to the public, the CD is still one of the best consumer audio formats ever invented. It has excellent quality audio, no DRM, and most discs last practically forever. And it's even experiencing a bit of a vinyl-style comeback at the moment, which means that decent quality players - and even boomboxes, by the looks of it - are still available.

In Sweden they were called bergsprängare Berg = Mountain Sprängare = blaster. I loved them.

Ugh, I am so happy to have seen your channel grow to what it has all these years later! Thank you for your hard work and dedication to the craft, truly!

Muppets and the cat guarantee a good video!

I giggled like a school girl when the muppets popped up on the screen. I forgot how much I missed those guys! Thanks for the teaser Matt!

Full speed USB 1.1! Haven't seen that spec in a lifetime!

Matt. I have got the Minidisc version of the JVC boombox. Got it in 1998 and it's still going. They made them to last back in the day. Great video.

Ghetto blaster = listening to rap in New York Boombox = listening to Spice Girls in Straford-Upon-Avon

A friend of mine (German), working in Atlanta, Georgia, entered a shopping mall and wanted to get a "ghettoblaster". She told us, the face of the seller she won't never forget in her life.

That need to use the remote to flip through DAB stations is crazy. This is very obviously going to end up sitting on a shelf in workshops etc, that remote is getting lost almost immediately. You really wonder about some product designers

"I choose to buy compilation CDs instead of several records, because I find it easier" is not a sentence I would expect to hear on 2024, but I'm here for it and I'm happy there are still people like you, sir.

This video reminded me that I rescued an old boomcylinder like this from being thrown out last year. Forgot all about it and just went and dug it out of the spare room and it is in fact a prior model to this. The JVC RV-NB100B, a similar design but also features an iPhone (lightning) dock front and centre. It's only 40W but it still packs a punch and the sound is actually rather wonderful. I shall be giving it a good clean and will put it to use. Thanks as always for the upload x

I recently inherited my grandpa's 80's Magnavox twin-stereo dual-cassette boombox. They took that thing out to sea and wherever else they vacationed. It's still holding up, definitely needs new belts in the tape mechanisms. But yeah, super cool thing to just have.

The train station announcement was hilarious. The guitar input is also an interesting idea. The lights not reacting to the music is a missed opportunity.

What an epic thumbnail! And a subject near and dear (boomboxes), and a return to muppetology? Yes please!

They could so easily have included a storage feature for the remote in the oversized CD compartment.

What do we want ? Getto blaster, when do we want it, 43 years ago. 😂

My brother had an older version of this. It had a pouch for the remote on the shoulder strap. It was just as reliant on the remote to access all functions so that isn't new, but it's amazing that they stopped including at least a small piece of fabric for something so important to be stored

When I was a kid the terms Boom Box and Ghetto Blaster were considered interchangeable. I've never heard of someone insisting it be called one or the other lol I'm glad to see the Puppet Pals make an appearance!

i have no reason for thinking this but I'm certain your cat loves listening to you speak.

LED lights should have been a VU meters. Lost opportunity… They do have modern day boom box, these things are called job-site radio, made by tool companies like DeWalt and Milwaukee

I have a Sony Xplode boombox, and it's excellent. It has a remote, but you don't need it. And it has a subwoofer. My dad has a 90s JVC Boombox that I found for him in a thrift shop for I kid you not $10. It's got lots of manual switches for adjusting the sound. And he absolutely loves it. He was about to settle for a cheap tube-shaped boombox from our local Bimart, because they were the only ones who still seemed to sell a boombox. He's much happier with the one I got him. I needed it's CD Drive cleaned and rebuilt. But it was worth it to him.His stereo also has an excellent cassette deck that was a part of a stacked stereo he had in the 90s. He junked the first stereo I remember him having. But I saved the cassette player from it. 20 years later he buys his current stacked stereo, and it's cassette deck was faulty. So I went to my place, dug up the vintage one I'd saved out of storage, and brought it over to him. He was amazed to see it, and pt it into the stereo right into the stack where the faulty cassette deck was, and it still worked like new. It's still a part of his stereo now.

the tribit stormbox blast is a really good speaker if you just want a boombox form factor speaker. lots of battery, can do indoor volumes for at least 14 hours straight. and we didnt have it quiet, we just wanted to be able to hear each other to communicate while we were working. it has enough output to fill a small outdoor space like a backyard party. in a straight line you can hear the music clearly a hundred or two feet away. if you have it for any normal indoor space, one of these things absolutely fill it with music loud enough to hurt your ears if you stand in the wrong spot (and i dont mean pressing your head up to it or something silly like that either) ive had it for a couple years now and its great. i saw it on the list and i know that this video is not for that but i know that a lot of people will find plenty use from bluetooth speakers. it is the perfect size to throw in a car and its too heavy to be convenient but its light enough to be reasonable to carry. ive gone on walks with it also as for jvc calling the subject of the video 3 different things, i dont think they really were. -"boomblaster" sounds like a product name. like how the hyundai elantra is not a statement on how all 4 door 4 wheeled vehicles are called "Elantras" speakers with radios and physical media players are not "boomblasters" -"boombox" is them using the standard nomenclature, i live in america and the only time ive ever heard of someone referring to something as a "ghetto blaster" is when they are talking about a very cheap handgun, especially a hi-point. everyone ive ever known calls them boomboxes. theyll even call big bluetooth speakers boomboxes if they are old enough. to some people the notable quality of a "boombox" is just a speaker able to create sound under its own power, separate from a wall, and that is of a certain size/can play music louder than a smaller portable radio. Using the Hyundai Elantra metaphor, this would be like advertising it as a "compact sedan" -"mobile hifi system with powered subwoofer, CD, USB, DAB/FM-tuner and bluetooth audio streaming" is the very dry technical name. this is the modern standard of product description with minimally required cultural context. in 50 years when audio tech has changed significantly the semantics in this definition will be much less contentious than what is and is not a "boombox" Going back to the Elantra it would be like saying it is a "five seat, four wheel an automobile with a closed body and a closed trunk separated from the part in which the driver and passengers sit" this is all assuming "boomblaster" is actually not a word that is used to describe boomboxes in which case egg on my face i guess

I laughed HARD at the trainstation announcement !! Hilarious !

Cat had enough of waiting for the bench LOL. 'You done yet?'

Being a teenager in the 1980's I remember the proper Boomboxes. This is the closest I've seen in quite a few years. I remember lugging my 40lbs Boombox on my shoulder and I would hope the batteries would last a couple of hours. It kills me when I look online for one now days and see these cheap dinky things. No audio output, crappy radios and if they have tape decks they sound terrible. I'm glad to see JVC at least trying to revive a bit of the past. I remember back in the 80's and 90's they did make some great sounding units. Matt thanks for keeping the dream alive. I hope designers at some of these companies watch your videos. Maybe they will take the hint.

I still have my Magnavox D8443 Boombox from 1983. It’s still in mint condition and still works awesome.

Glad I found your channel. I was about to buy a Philips Bumbox but your review made me rethink that move. I recently found and got a Sanyo MCD like the one I had when I was in high school so my collector side has activated.

There exist two kinds of ID3 tags. ID3v1 is probably the only one this thing supports, these are just a set of fixed-length fields at the end of the file (you can easily read them with the naked eye if you open an mp3 in a hex editor and scroll all the way to the end). ID3v2 is a rather complex, extensible data structure at the beginning of the file. It can include arbitrary unicode strings and embedded cover art, among other things. Your files probably only have ID3v2.

The "you have to use the remote" thing makes this a 1-star device right off the bat.

It makes me happy to see these are still being made. I always wanted one in the early 2000s but coudln't afford them. Then, in 2014, despite being WAY late to the party (bluetooth speakers were already becoming a thing), I fulfilled my wish and bought a RV-NB75 which has lots of similarities with this one, for example the thick plastics, and the CD lock twisty knob. My model still runs on D-cells and doesn't have DAB or illuminated speakers, but it's party trick is that it mimics a cassette deck, but instead of a cassette you can put a smartphone into the door and play the files stored on there. Also it's got 2 big volume knobs, one for the general volume, and one for the "super woofer".

I bought one of the original JVC Boomblasters when I was 15, which I still have at my parents house, and that thing is a beast and has been with me all over the world. It had a better shoulder strap than this one, with a nice soft shoulder pad and a pocket to store the remote and carabiners for easily taking it off.

Your enthusiasm for boomboxes matches my own.

I bought the JVC RV-DP200 in 2003 (almost 2 decades ago). It was the largest and most powerful JVC boomblaster (larger and heavier than that modern one) with lots of cool and weird features (no LED lights around the speakers though, cause it wasn't a thing back then). You can change the speed of the music, add lots of sound effects, connect external sources to it like an electric guitar or something. It has an orange glowing screen (not glowing anymore), flashing indicator LED's that move to the music and show the intensity of the volume too (from green to red), a drum machine! And the bass is still absolutely insane! When the bass volume is on max it can make things literally move in the room, lol. I've used it regularly since i bought it, up to 2017-18 maybe, even 24/7 for long periods, probably ten thousand hours or something. The CD acts a bit strange now though (sometimes). Now i got tons of great boomboxes and stereo units so i don't really need it anymore, but it's still right next to me in the bedroom (the bed is literally surrounded by different era boomboxes on shelves, and that's just the bed. My apartment is like a boombox warehouse now, lol. A maze of huge shelves filled with boomboxes, but other retro items too (about 150 boomboxes i think, mostly 70's/80's but up to 2010-15. I had one other boombox before the JVC (my first real boombox) that i bought in the late 90's and it was pretty cool too but i sold it later unfortunately. One of my newer boomboxes (from 2015 maybe, bought used), well, a bluetooth device actually, but huge and heavy like the JVC, is my Pioneer DJ STZ-D10Z-R. It's beautiful and very powerful. And i got a few really big SHARP boomboxes from the 80's that sound great and take a lot of space, lol. The biggest one is too heavy and wide to carry around (HK-9000), not the biggest boombox ever but pretty close. It's got like a million buttons and a pretty powerful deep bass. I can't post pics so you have to google them. Edit: the Pioneer doesn't have bluetooth so you have to put the source (mobile or mp3 player) inside it. It's got a compartment. Or use the AUX

Great video just wanted to say that I have owned that JVC boombox in an older model which had the exact same speaker setup except instead of Bluetooth it had cassette and CD. It sounded fantastic I actually used it in my house for a long time. This is probably 20 years ago

I absolutely loved the railway station echo effect!

"block rocking beats". Mat, you're the fucking best

I have a JVC boombox, from the late 90’s and I have the same type of tuner setup, just like you. I brought it before, they put the aux in, on the boombox and no DAB radio.😢 I still use from time to time, now it’s just in my garden shed. 😊

It has the aesthetics of a soil pipe.

Nice to see a half decent unit with good sound, a little clunky on the interface but not bad for what you get. I recently found a Philips AZ8304 in a ditch whilst walking the dog, I shall attempt to repair it and get it working again. it's wing handles reminds me of this a little and I saw it on the catalogue page on the video.

I have a first gen JVC Kaboom. This is the newest version, glad to see its still around.

that machine is a blast from the past! my brother had one of it's antecedants of very similar design with a tape deck in the centre in the very late 90s! amazing to see essentially the same shape even now!

A friend of mine built his own boombox in the 80's from an old tube type vacuum cleaner, a car stereo and a motorcycle battery, but the last I heard from him he converted an old JVC (that did no longer run from mains) from D-cells to LiPo batterys and a mains charger so now he has his dream boombox but with great battery time and possibility to have it mains-connected

Cool! I sold quite some of the large JVC boom boxes 20 years ago. They were then already considered the last of their kind on the market. JVC had a complete different position in the consumer electronics market then, though. They were one of the most important brands. Now, not so much anymore, at least over here. It makes me happy that this product concept survived through all that time. Now that mobile music players/speakers are again very popular, maybe they could have their own little renaissance if marketed a little better.

Puppets and a cat? Lordy this could be the best episode ever.

Mat's radio. Believe me, he likes it loud. He's the man with the box that can rock the crowd. Great video

WOW love that you tested the bass using a DEAD PREZ cd!!! You truly are one of the coolest retrotech youtubers there is! Glad to have been following you for years. Ever going to give us a tour of your collection room? Or have i missed that one?

I have an original JVC RV-B 90 in green colour. Bought in 1999. Still works....but need a bit of attention. Wonderful piece of kit...

Over the last few years I have bought a number of vintage radios and ghetto blasters, mostly the ones I remember myself from the 70s and 80s. The early ones were so incredibly heavy and so well made. later 80s ones were a lot lighter and cheaper build. I’m finding that when it comes to using them that nostalgia just isn’t what it used to be and they are usually a disappointment in the sound quality, but never a disappointment from a fun perspective.

Did you guys across the pond never get the JVC Kaboom?!? Man that's the spiritual successor! I remember my dad getting a radioshack credit card in the year 1997 and bringing me to buy a brand new stereo and we walked out with a Kaboom! I immediately drained the 8 D cell batteries out in the yard blasting the subwoofer on some Wu-tang Clan. We loved that thing. Could have used that li-on battery! Makes me want to get one of these!

Needs a LOUD button but otherwise a solid unit for something modern :) @22:41 That's some "One Step Beyond" Madness!

I grew up with a JVC Kaboom Box that my dad for for me as a pre-teen for a birthday. I kept it until I was 27 and it still worked fine. We tested every similar-style option at Best Buy back when you could do such things and it sounded best, beating out those other all-in-one systems with disconnecting speakers. Now I use high-end studio monitors and some Linkwitz Lab LX Studios that I built from Siegfried Linkwitz’s amazing designs, but that thing and car audio (my dad had an automotive 8-track and a few boxes of tapes for it that he mounted in my Powerwheels for me) got me into audio as a kid.

Boom box was a big part of the nomenclature when I was a kid, BUT we mainly referred to them as whether or not that had dual high speed dubbing or not because that was the big thing when I was in the market

I've had two JVC Boomblasters over the last 25 years (the first one got stolen, which is why I purchased the second one) both were absolutely amazing! This one has lost the tape player, but has added BT and DAB, honestly seems like a decent trade off.

Certainly be able to piss off a lot of people on a bus with that

Love your peeling plastic off music.

Ive come across multiple of the older version of this model and the CD player always goes insane.

Beautifully done video.

The lights not reacting to the music is a missed opportunity

Today's Boombox video: The Moan Family Puppets are back!;)

Welp, curse you, Techmoan. You've succeeded in making me feel young - in that boomboxes are awesome; and simultaneously old - in that if someone younger than me fired up this device while we were both trapped in a train car, I'd want to throw it (and possibly the owner) under the third rail.

Ooh man, the click of you retracting the antenna was so satisfying! We won't have any of this before too long

Price checking from a period Argos catalogue!! Absolutely spot on 😎 Great video

5:45 Epson PX-8 and a Minitel 257 unless I'm mistaken. Very nice! I like my old computers as much as you like your audio gear I think!

Matthew, you should have your cat on screen more, even if it shows contempt being in your presence, that's why cats are entertaining.

It’s Techcat approved, that’s good enough for me!

I owned a couple of portable stereos when I was a kid and a teenager but it wasn't until my late teenage years for Christmas. I got the most awesome boombox I could have ever wanted and it was all I wanted for Christmas. The Fisher pw3000 it was an amazing stereo with detachable speakers and I had this 3D surround sound that just made music sound epic. And thanks to its dimensions and detachable speakers, I was able to mount the thing in my locker at school and hang the speakers on the door and I moved my locker to one that had an outlet directly above it and at lunch time I would just blast it and people would come by with music for me to play. It was pretty awesome

*Anker Soundcore Motion Boom Plus.* *Low cost, loud, huge sound, big bass, great EQ.*

Yeah, the muppet dolls are back!

The irony of skipping through music made up almost entirely of samples to avoid a content match.

I’ve been missing the puppets, please bring them back more regularly.

It's always a pleasure to hear the joy in Matt's voice when he's reviewing something he genuinely likes.

I was just thinking about being DJ Lance this Halloween. Got to thinking about his boom box, and there is this video on my feed. Awesome!

“ROIGHT LIFT ROIGHT LIFT ROIGHT LIFT ROIGHT LIFT” 😂😂😂

Ahhh I love the "internet muppets"! Long been missed. I wish you (Techmoan) would be approached by a big company and consulted about a new boom box - show 'em how to get it right. So many missed opportunities with this one (reactive LED, USB File Formats, CD Text, some chrome or gawdy silver plastic) they're all a no brainer in a modern boom box.

Dig out the lino, the fila tracksuit and any pair of retro Adidas trainers 😂😂

I'm glad I'm not the only one who's happy to see your puppetry again. I always love knowing about people's other passions.

I got a few ghettoblasters and I’m keeping them ! Been a Bboy my whole life ! Great video

13:51 a man of fine hip hop culture right there. ♥ [edit] 16 people like eating fresh fruits and vegetables while learning how to get a doctorates degree in dismantling the colonial white man's system of oppression

Edit****I typed this b4 u pulled out the Kaboombox. U ever have a JVC Kaboombox. My friend had one back when it came out (I think around 98') It was a very good boombox especially for breakdancing outdoors. Maybe check out one of the older ones to compare the sound

My inner 10 year old would want to mount it on my shoulder and pretend it's a rocket launcher :D. Nice video as always, thanks!

Nice looking and nice sounding JVC boombox. Also love the Breaker’s Revenge cd. I’m still buying and collecting the smaller boomboxes from the 80s and loving how they look and sound.

9:07 this new generation will never know how that feels. Ahhhh, memory lane.

I like it that so many RU-vid content providers have cats, which often impose themselves in the videos. 😺😺😺

love the end cat came over to say hi

Ooohhh! The muppets made a short appearance! Happy days indeed! :) :) :)

Recently found a boombox with radio, CD and cassette player outside in the rain. Works really nice for the kitchen.

The thing that cough my eye was the ball bearings to retain the CD. That is something I've haven't seen in a while on a modern device, and I was pleasently surprised.