4-track switchbox

This was a thing I built around age 14ish (I'm still trying to pin this down; it had to be after I bought the TEAC A-2340SX) to help with mixdowns and making use of tape-delay effects. I remember specifically that the internal wiring took about 5 hours, which I did pretty much in a single stretch, which just proves that I can succeed when I really try shows the importance of motivation in focusing when one is ADD-ish.

Front

The area around the two DIN jacks labeled "TAPE 2" got crushed when someone put something heavy and not-flat on top of the box sometime in the late 1990s.

The bank of switches on the left basically select the input (out of 8 possibilities) for each of the four tracks on the recorder:

• LOOP: output from the recorder / EXTERNAL: either of two possible sources (AMP or TAPE 1)
• AMP: the hifi amplifier / TAPE 1: the cassette deck I used for mixdowns, a TEAC C-3RX which was probably my first major equipment purchase ever ($500)
• LEFT / RIGHT should be obvious; using this, I could get stereo echo from the 4-track.

Inside

Both images were taken with a scanner, sacrificing some color accuracy for detail. The backplane is kind of dark here because it's further from the glass than in a normal scan.