Alba SCR 850

The SCR 850 (also written as SCR-850) is a 2-band stereo radio cassette recorder manufactured by the Alba Corporation in China. It has dual cassette decks with deck B capable of high-speed dubbing. It also sports a 3-band graphic equaliser and separate volume controls for each channel. This unit has a built-in mains transformer, but can also accept power from six "C" size cells in the battery compartment.

This is a very basic budget-end radio cassette with dual decks; however, it has some good points going for it if you look hard. This unit has a single motor, which drives the capstan flywheels of both decks simultaneously, and therefore you can expect precisely the same tape speed when dubbing cassettes. It has a 3-band graphic equaliser, which provides 10 dB boost / cut of treble and bass frequencies and sounds very nice.

Cost/eBay

This would have been a mass-produced budget-end model and therefore there should be many out there. Unfortunately, a small proportion of these radio cassettes suffered clutch mechanism failure resulting in damaging the tapes and therefore many people would have thrown them away as they were very low-cost. However, these units were hand assembled and today difficult to replace, as they no longer manufacture them. A good working unit in mint condition together with the original box could fetch fifty pounds and more, however a broken unit in used condition might bring approximately ten pounds.

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