I'm afraid I can't offer much insight into a new cassette deck -- I've got a 10+ year old Pioneer dual deck stashed away in a cabinet, collecting dust. The two most likely candidates aside from the old cassette tape would probably be MiniDisc or DAT tape, which is probably the digital cassette you were thinking of. Along the lines of a CD recorder, I stumbled across something at Yamaha's site a couple weeks back that might interest you: CD recorder with built-in hard drive . I glanced at the manual, and it can record line inputs to the hard drive (such as the tape loop output from the 950), so you could record radio broadcasts and play them back when you want or copy them to a disc. It doesn't have any sort of timer record capability that I could see, which could be something of a drawback (and may be true of other devices as well), but 30 some odd hours of recording space could be sort of handy in and of itself. List price is $500, but it may be available for less online. It's apparently not the only one of its kind, either, because Best Buy lists a similar unit from TDK (TA-9000) for $300 ( ExtremeTech review ) -- and J and R World has it for $250 before $50 mail-in rebate.

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