I have two boomboxes, both of which have seen better days. The first is a GE-branded unit I bought new in the '80s at a department store, for something like $30 or so. This unit worked well and still works today (I still use it to transfer cassettes to my Winamp mp3 player), except the door over the cassette compartment is broken such that it will not latch, and the eject button on the control panel doesn't work any longer either. The second is a Panasonic which I found in a pile of trash behind my apartment last year. The tape deck and everything else worked fine at the time, although the original batteries had been left in it and had leaked, of course. The boombox worked well on AC, however, until recently when the tape deck gave up; probably just a stretched or broken belt, but I haven't done anything with it yet. Both bboxes are stashed away under my bed, awaiting the day when I feel like working on them again. But since I have a fairly good Radio Shack SCT-11 stereo cassette deck hooked up to my stereo, I'm in no hurry to repair either boombox. One thing that has me baffled is how on earth I'm going to get the Panasonic apart to get at the cassette deck. I have screwdrivers long enough to reach the screws, but somehow I can't get them seated in the screw heads solidly enough to turn them.
Hmmm.
If it were not for this setback, I may well have had the Panasonic bb's tape deck working again by now. It's a great-sounding unit and worked very well when the deck was still operating; in fact, it looks as if it is built much more solidly than the GE.
However, I think the GE-branded unit is a rebadged offshore-made piece of junk.
The General Electric Company we all knew back in the day wouldn't have turned out such shabbily-made equipment with cheap plastic parts, but the old GE based in Schenectady, New York is no more. IMO, the GE logo and name are being recycled on this offshore stuff probably just to keep them from going into the public domain.
BTW: The same GE whose logo appears on my boombox is the parent company of NBC, which probably explains why the programming on that network is, today, nowhere nearly the caliber of the programming put out by the NBC television network when it was owned and operated by RCA. Darn, GE even did away with the NBC radio network and all of its great programming, including the Monitor Beacon (1955-1975)! No, wait a minute, RCA killed Monitor in '75. GE could not care less about radio, which is why it washed its hands of the NBC radio network almost entirely (except for NBC News Radio) after it assumed control of NBC-TV in 1986.
I apologize for the rant, but having liked NBC-TV and radio so well when they were still under RCA's ownership and control (I am almost 52 years old and well remember the NBC peacock, as well as the TV network's great shows, not to mention the Monitor Beacon on NBC radio), I all but see red when I think of what GE and Vivendi have done to this once-proud network. As the expression goes, today's NBC "ain't your father's TV network!" Unfortunately.