Victor Cosmopolitan 8-in-1 Music Center: Play and digitize

This retro entertainment system handles vinyl, cassettes, CDs, FM radio, and more and it can copy it to digital media. Need more? There's Bluetooth, too.

- JON JACOBI

almost titled this review "Everything but 8-Track," but that would've been starting on a negative note for what I consider to be a very positive product: Victor Audio's Cosmopolitan 8-in-1 Music Center. It's the most versatile of the more than a dozen nostalgic, legacy-media playback devices the company has to offer.

Versatile in not only playing vinyl (at 33, 45, and even 78 rpm), cassettes, CDs, and AM/FM radio, it can also digitize any of that material to USB or SD media in MP3 format. It will even record to cassette if that's of interest. About the only trick missing is burning audio to CD (and the aforementioned 8-track), but that's a far more complicated process because of all the formatting involved. In truth, I had no desire to burn CDs. Did I mention that it will also transmit and receive Bluetooth audio?

 Victor sent me the silver-faced version. of the Cosmopolitan with dark faux-wood sides, but it's also available in basic black if you want an appearance that pretty much shouts 1980s. Physically, the Cosmopolitan measures around 12.5 inches wide, by 10.5 inches deep, by just over 8 inches tall with its top-mounted record player cover closed.

The front is home to the cassette desk and CD player, LCD readout, controls, and digital and analog input output. The back contains the power jack (it uses an AC wall adapter, not an internal transformer), the captive FM antenna wire, and analog stereo RCA outputs.

The front panel controls include component selection buttons, as well as large tuning and volume (press for power) knobs. There's another row of controls above the CD tray that controls that device as well as performs other functions: Record (Rec), Delete (Del), Program, Repeat, Play/ Pause, Stop, Previous (track, station, and so forth), and Next.