I've loved this stuff since I was a teenager and first got into HiFi. Those shiny manufacturer brochures touting the advantages of their design over the competition, resplendent with cutaway diagrams and photos of the inside of the gear they were selling were an endless source of fascination. When my buddy who got me into this initially would return from the Chicago CES each year, laden with shopping bags full of brochures, we'd sit in his room and pour over all of it for hours, daydreaming that one day we'd own some of it.
I was kind of surprised that a cursory internet search for photos of the inside of my new Tascam deck were nowhere to be found. Fuck it, I thought. I'll make my own. So I disconnected everything, popped the cover, and snapped a photo worthy of a product brochure.
Even though I already knew (from having the Service Manual) that there was no audiophile-grade CD mechanism in this deck, but instead just a standard Teac (parent company of Tascam) IDE CDROM drive like you'd find in a desktop or tower computer of the era, it was still kind of surprising to actually see it. And the 2015 date stamp on the drive was another surprise, confirming that I'd gotten one of the units from the last year they were in production.