I bought this “Encore Technology” unit a couple of years ago, and it turned out to be a piece of shit. The turntable speed was off, the radio tuner was highly inaccurate, the sound was extremely bass and it had no controls to adjust that aspect, and it ate tapes for breakfast. Give me some alternatives to look at, please.
What’s your price range? And what features do you need? Are you looking for an all-in-one unit (including speakers) or will separate speakers be ok? Is streaming radio over the internet acceptable or do you prefer an actual tuner?
Tapes are damn near obsolete (and I assume you mean cassette tapes, though at this point reel to reel and 8 tracks are about as modern as cassettes). I haven’t seen a tape deck for sale in years. Records have made a comeback of sorts so turntables are available.
A lot of my music is on cassette and record only, and needs to be transferred to cd. as long as there is an audio out, I don’t care if the speakers are attached or not.
There are USB turntables available that you can connect to a computer and then use a program like Audacity to make a digital file (I think you want a .WAV file for CDs). Likewise I discovered that there are cassette decks that also have USB outputs. Once you have the records and tapes converted into digital files you can burn CDs. But that requires two separate items plus a computer, and that is just to convert everything to digital. Now there may be a single device that can do this for both records and cassettes but I wouldn’t expect them to be high quality, more like what you used to have.
As for playback, any reason you want CDs? You are going from two very old formats, converting them to a modern format (digital files), and then putting them on a somewhat old format (CD) that is becoming obsolete. Might be better off just using an mp3 player or better yet a phone to play the music. Plenty of ways to play digital music files from a phone: using old stereo systems (my choice), headphones, wireless speakers, car stereo, etc. I have about 500 CDs that I ripped and have on a tiny SD card. Far easier than lugging 500 CDs around. Depends on the size of your collection, I guess.