TBH I’d expected you to unearth a setup more like this
[IMG]https://www.partyvibe.org/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=155259&d=1462822078[/IMG]
which to be fair wasn’t that wide of the mark for the 1980s – you often had to build your own DJ equipment including mixers etc.. and memory chips / digital audio systems were way too expensive until well into the 1990s.
I found a load more 1980s dance music mix tapes from NL on youtube which are actual spools of tape; the DJ’s had to mark each group of beats on the other side of the tape with a chinagraph pencil – and then physically cut the tape on a edit block and splice the sections together with special adhesive tape. The magnetic tape usually ran at 190 mm / second for FM broadcast quality; a minute of the recording would occupy 11 400mm of tape. if the track was 120 bpm then the beats are every 95mm (if the turntables and tape machine are accurately set to the correct speed; alas this sort of equipment was way out of my price range, even at school we didn’t have anything as precise as what the Dutch teenagers seemed to be able to get access to).
at least the sound equipment I used (built out of obsolete kit from my school and random parts that British Telecom gave away when they upgraded the local Telephone Exchange which was also used by BBC and GCHQ) used transistors rather than valves so you didn’t get shocked too often….
