My Mother had a portable Soundesign cassette player/recorder. It eventually became mine [of course]. Here was yet another unit for me to interconnect with the other stuff. What was nice about this particular deck was it had an auxilliary input, and a monitor output. This was the era of ALC [automatic level control] recording portables. There really was nothing automatic about it. Fixed [unvariable] recording level was a more truthful way to put it. When you had varying levels of source material, this definitely was NOT a good thing. If you were recording anything other than a fixed level test tone, your source audio was going to be of varying levels;). Of course, after some searching through YouTube, I found a video of the particular model I had. It's nice to see one in such good condition, with all of the accessories, no less!
I had the old BSR record player, the cassette player, a few different radios, numerous speakers, my own "switchboard" for routing connections and the Philips console all interconnected in one way or another. When the old DUMONT black and white console TV finally was past the point of being repaired, I gutted the cabinet and made it in to a big speaker cabinet.
At one point I did get my own STEREO suitcase portable record player. Even though I really really wanted it, I tended to favour the BSR and the multitude of connections I'd created. There even was a speaker out in the kitchen. [Check the photo below for the exact same model of speaker cabinet!] Music from the PHILIPS could be piped to it, or I could send any of the sound sources from the rec room [where I had my set up] to that speaker. I even had a patch cord so I could run this cassette player through the PHILIPS console stereo. Unfortunately, the 60 cycle hum from the DC adapter got amplified as well.
At a local convenience store, I found one of the same type of speaker boxes that my Grandfather made back in the 1950's and 1960's at the furniture factory he worked at! I used to have a few of these, with different speakers from my collection of the ones I'd purchased at the local hardware store. My favourite pair had the speakers from the old DUMONT TV. Things just didn't sound quite right without a matched pair. [Update: The convenience store mentioned no longer exists. I wonder what happened to the speaker box...]
For grades 7 and 8, I went to Elora Senior Public School. On ocassion there would be "Sock Hops" during the noon hour. One of the teachers, a Mr. Brown I believe it was, knew of my fondness for electronics and interconnecting things. I was a member of the AV club [audio-visual]. [I was a geek/nerd even before such a term was commonplace]. He suggested that I'd be an ideal choice for being the school DJ.
When I was in grade 8, I got the job of being the lunchtime "Sock Hop" disc-jockey. The setup was really quite atrocious. I got to use an "educational grade" stereo record player, but only one channel of it, routed through a Radio Shack/Realistic mono amplifier to two home made full range speakers. It did seem to be loud enough. As much as I protested to the then "powers that be", they still wouldn't let me use two mono record players. I had to make do with what they would let me use. I tried connecting my cassette player to the set up, but that didn't work either. I had to play one record, and when it was done, quickly take that one off of the unit, put the next record on the record player and cue and play it. As a matter of necessity and convenience, I would use 7" 45 rpm singles for the vast majority of the time. I wasn't comfortable on the microphone, so I suspect there was significant "dead air".
Most of the music I played for those sock hops could be found on the CHUM (AM) Top 100 charts of 1972, 1973 and 1974.
The KTEL compilations were CHEAP and the content of the compilations varied from country to country. Here in Canada, it seemed that just about every compilation included a Stampeders track.
