Walking into the Jr. Market boutique in Highland Park is like stepping into a 1980s time warp. Built in a repurposed shipping container, it's filled with everything from small Walkman-style laptops to colorful clock radios with numbers and, naturally, boomboxes of all sizes. Few are more imposing than the TV the Searcher, an early '80s Sharp boombox that features a built-in 5-inch color TV.
“Try to lift it, it's too heavy,” warns Spencer Richardson, the store's owner. In fact, the machine weighs at least 15 pounds. without the 10 D batteries that power the unit. He adds: “I don't think you're going to take this to the beach so you can watch TV while listening to music.”
Richardson, an affable and very knowledgeable owner in his 30s, repairs and resells analog music technology from the 1980s or earlier. By putting these rehabilitated musicians back into circulation, you are helping others rediscover a musical format that was once assumed dead. While his hobby began as “a gateway to discovering sounds” I might not have otherwise heard, it now attracts curious customers willing to spend upwards of $100 for a vintage Technics RS-M2 or my first Sony walkman. His customers include older baby boomers and members of Generation
A rare Technics RS-M2 stereo radio deck. “I've worked on many tape players and this one screams quality inside and out,” Richardson writes on Instagram.
(Spencer Richardson)
Unlike record players, which have become increasingly high-tech thanks to the “vinyl renaissance” of the past 20 years, almost all cassette players produced today rely on the same basic tape mechanism from Taiwan, Richardson explains. Although cassette culture is enjoying its own period of rediscovery, albeit on a much smaller scale, it has not seen a market emerge for newly designed cassette decks. And he's fine with that.
“I'm not one of those people who says, 'Why don't they make good new tape players?'” he says. “No one needs to improve them. It is still better to buy one reconditioned from the time they were manufactured.”
That's where it comes in.
Richardson works on a Nakamichi recorder in his repair studio in downtown Los Angeles.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
It's easy to forget that when cassettes first appeared in the mid-1960s, the technology was innovative. Not only were the players much more portable than record players, but unlike records, tapes were shock-resistant. Even more profoundly, cassettes democratized access to the act of recording itself, as cassette technology required minimal infrastructure and costs.
“I think about how incredible it must have been for people to realize that they could put whatever they wanted on a tape, fold it, and give it to a friend,” Richardson says.
Entire musical genres, especially in the developing world, became much more accessible across borders. In some countries, great albums are still released on cassette. “I have a Filipino version of Kanye West's 'College Dropout' recorded,” Richardson says.
The limitations of the technology guided the listening experience. Because skipping songs on a player was a pain, most people sat with albums on cassette as a linear track-by-track journey, the antithesis of the random, algorithmic playlists ubiquitous on today's streaming platforms. It's a rhythm Richardson appreciates.
“I want things to be intentional and slow,” he says. “I don't need them to be optimized.”
He learned how to repair equipment by watching YouTube videos, examining old manuals and through trial and error.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Born in the early 1990s, Richardson grew up in Santa Monica and Pacific Palisades, where his mother's home was lost in the Los Angeles wildfires last year. He's old enough to remember cassettes as a child: “My mom had books on tape like 'Winnie the Pooh,' but I didn't go out and buy tapes.” Fast forward to the mid-2010s and I was working at the now-defunct Touch Vinyl in West Los Angeles. “In 2014, we started this little ribbon label in the store,” he explained. “Bands would come play and we would duplicate 10 tapes and give them away or sell them.” Richardson slowly began collecting cassettes, but after the store closed a few years later, he realized how difficult it was to find people to repair his tape players.
Finally, once the pandemic hit in 2020 and everyone was stuck at home, he decided to learn how to repair his equipment by watching YouTube. “I was fascinated by the videos, absorbing welding techniques and tools I might need,” he said. With no formal engineering experience, Richardson began collecting information online, examining old manuals and learning through trial and error. “You just need to stick your hands in and say, 'Oh, okay, I see how this works,' or maybe I don't see how it works and I'll just bang my head against the wall and, a year later, try again.” His first successful repair was on his Teac CX-311, a compact stereo cassette player/recorder that he still owns. “It has some quirks but it works well.”
A few years later, Richardson's girlfriend, Faith, suggested he start selling his players online through an Instagram account, jrmarket.radio, originally created for a short-lived internet station. Tim Mahoney, his childhood friend and professional photographer, photographed the units against a white background, as if in an art catalog. A community of enthusiasts quickly found their account, and Richardson began selling pieces online and through pop-ups. In 2024, the owners of vintage clothing store Bearded Beagle invited him to take over the parking space behind their new location on Figueroa St. Opening a physical store had not been his ambition, but Richardson accepted the opportunity: “I never imagined opening my own physical store. It's hard enough to have a retail space in Los Angeles to sell something that is very specialized.”
Jr. Market operates as a store Thursday through Saturday in Highland Park.
(Spencer Richardson)
Jr. Market, whose name is inspired by the Japanese convenience stores known as “junior markets,” doesn't try to appeal to audiophiles, although Richardson has studio-quality recording equipment. He primarily looks for players with visually appealing designs, most of them made in Japan, where Richardson has been traveling since graduating high school. Through those trips, he learned where to get impeccably preserved gear, including his best-seller Corocasse: a bright red plastic cube shaped like a radio/tape player, introduced by National in 1983. He also keeps an eye out for the unique 1979 Sanyo MR-QF4, an elongated boombox with four speakers, designed to play horizontally or flipped into a vertical tower.
The store also carries a small selection of portable record players, including a Viktor PK-2, a whimsical three-in-one record player with a plastic body, tape player and AM radio that looks like something designed by a modernist artist for Fisher-Price. That was for local author and historian Sam Sweet, who visited the store with no intention of purchasing anything and left with the Viktor, which now sits on his desk. “Spencer is part of a long tradition of shop repairmen and specialty mechanics,” Sweet says. “The refurbished devices he sells are as much a reflection of his ethics and experience as they are treasures from the past.”
Last year, Imma Almourzaeva, Echo Park's art director, came to the store and bought a huge 1979 Sony “Zilba'p” boombox, measuring nearly 2 feet wide and more than a foot tall, with wood veneer panels to boot. Almourzaeva, who grew up in Russia in the '90s, wanted a player that would offer “the tactile sensation of my childhood and bring it back to my daily routine, something familiar, something warm.” The Zilba'p is the largest boombox Richardson has ever carried and Almourzaeva said: “It's aesthetically spectacular. Maybe I have a Napoleon complex because I'm also quite small. For me it's like 'go big or go home'.” She shared that she recently bought Richardson a Soviet-era boombox for her brother for Christmas. “It turned out that my mother grew up using the same brand of stereo,” Almourzaeva says. Richardson had told him that Soviet boomboxes are “very self-made, more original and finicky.”
Renovation is one of Richardson's specialties, including repairing client units, each of which is a puzzle he likes to solve. It doesn't matter if a player is sparse or packed with features, the simple act of playing a cassette creates a sense of calm and focus in him. “You don't get distracted because it doesn't do anything else,” he says. In an age when every “smart” device is marketed with a dizzying array of features, that simplicity can seem downright revolutionary.
