We had the equivalent tape recorder for the Atari 800 (the 410). Since Dad was an electrical engineer he drilled a hole into the top and gave us a screwdriver to adjust the azimuth to get particularly hard to load tape programs to load.

The downside is that we would save our own programs on cassettes with one azimuth and then have to screw around (literally) to find the azimuth we had recorded it on in order to be able to load the program again.

We seemed to have endless time and patience in those days as a kid. We would spend hours trying to load a game from a cassette, or a whole day typing in a program from a magazine only to have the computer crash before we could save it to cassette. And then start again.