I've been on the lookout for a lousy tape recorder for making lo-fi effects with recordings. This weekend I finally found one at a thrift store (surprising hard to do once you're looking for something specific).
I got it and a sweet "Romantic Piano Masterworks" cassette to test it with for less than $5 total.
As far as I can tell, it works perfectly. It doesn't have an audio-in port of any kind, just a built-in mic, so I'll need to mod it to allow a direct line to my audio interface.
But I wanted to test the recording ability, so I hooked up the 6-string bass, a delay pedal, and placed the crappy mic right in front of the speaker and played a test run... that ended up going for 13 minutes. I rather like the end result though. There's some parts in there that are probably worth revisiting.
Anyways, if you had some spare mushrooms laying around and were just looking for the perfect track to set the mood for that bad trip, I've got you covered.