Soundwave blue tapedeck11/20/2023 ![]() ![]() you wouldn't expect him to be cooperative, would you? Then again, Soundwave is a Decepticon MP3 player. There are no playlists, there's not even a 'Shuffle' option: Soundwave will play back the tracks on the MiniSD card in order of filename, meaning you'd have to spend ages adjusting filenames to organise things into albums, and then you'd still have to skip through dozens of tracks if you didn't want to simply start playing from the beginning each time. Essentially, the controls on the front, clockwise from top left, are Skip Back, Skip Forward, Increase Volume, Play/Pause and Decrease Volume. To be honest, it's more ' basic and poorly implemented'. However the operation of Soundwave as an MP3 player could be described as 'simplistic' if one wished to be generous. I believe that ML Soundwave supports up to a 1Gb card, so that's what I've got, and it's still nowhere near full. The MiniSD cards required are purportedly the main reason Music Label Soundwave was not released outside of Japan, despite the fact that they're not exactly hard to obtain. Like the original, his recorded media is inserted into a spring-loaded door on the front which is operated by a button on top but, obviously, it no longer supports microcassettes. While G1 Soundwave's weapons were designed to transform into batteries, ML Soundwave's weapons look as though they should, but actually don't, so his alternate mode isn't quite so self-contained as his ancestor's. This being a modern electronic device, it runs on a single AAA battery at 1.5v ( as opposed to the 9v behemoths required to run just about everything back in the days of G1 toys), making the battery compartment very small. This one has a real battery compartment, but not the belt clip, meaning he has to be kept in a pocket - potentially wearing away the paint - rather than worn proudly out in the open if used as an audio player. The absence that really bugs me is the belt clip, which was on the original toy's fake battery compartment. The ML version is about 80% of the size of the original, making him nice and compact though there's a distinct lack of the kind of molded detail the G1 model had, possibly as a result of the original ML Soundwave being designed to vaguely resemble the dull, featureless style of the earliest iPods. So, Soundwave - according to his G1 style labelling - is a 'Stereo Micro Cassette Recorder' (or 'dictating machine', in slightly more modern parlance) rather than the normal tape deck he was often depicted as in the associated fiction. ![]() I almost regret not taking 'before' photos. and so all my photos are fully stickered-up. Thankfully, Reprolabels quickly produced a set of stickers to add in all the G1 details one could want. but, as a huge fan of the G1 toy, which has only recently been supplanted by the Masterpiece version in my estimation, even a functioning MP3 player built to resemble Soundwave deserved to resemble him more closely than the basic ML Soundwave Spark Blue version. The metallic blue is nice, the silver is great. ![]() I'll say straight away that I found the stock 'Spark Blue' Soundwave rather bland in terms of its paint job. It didn't take long, however, for a G1 homage to turn up. Like Convoy, Soundwave - or, to give him his full, tautological mouthful of a title ' TransFormers Music Label Soundwave Playing Audio Player' - was originally released in white, back when Apple's attitude toward the colour of their proprietary media player was " you can have any colour you want, as long as it's white". Sure enough, over its two year lifetime, Music Label produced only three unique molds, but two were released in several colourschemes. The sorts of consumer electronics involved still tended to be quite expensive, and including them in transforming robot toys, while pretty cool in theory, was perhaps venturing too far into a niche market. Even at the time, Music Label seemed something of a potentially dangerous folly for Takara Tomy.
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