This should be my best tape deck, but it suffers from pretty bad wow & flutter, plus some level issues - the audio quickly goes muffled in one channel after pressing play. I thought it might be azimuth problems, but thankfully a new pinch roller did the trick.
I think I bought this deck for something like £35 from eBay, but it was a long time ago. They go for a lot more than that now. Recordings with Dolby S turned on are amazing - easily sounds as good as a CD. But it's never really worked properly, even after a change of belts. W&F seems to have got worse over the years (not helped by previous shoddy attempts to revive the existing pinch roller).
It also goes muffled in one channel quickly after starting. Pausing and restarting briefly rectifies this but not for long. I wondered if this was due to the head being out of alignment - not good news as adjusting this is more than I'm willing to risk doing myself. I'm likely to make things much worse.
The pinch roller has got to be the place to start. The rubber has gone pretty hard and shiny, with some cracking in places. The shininess might be the cause of the level issues, if the tape is slipping on the roller and going out of alignment with the head. That would explain why it gets better after restarting. A head out of alignment would be bad all the time.
There are some visible flat spots too - the cause of the rhythmic modulation you can hear when playing a test tone.
This is my attempt at a precision tool for resurfacing the existing roller. The inside of a pen glued to a square of plastic at an angle that allows me to get it on the roller through the tape door, to sand the surface with a piece of 400 grit sandpaper while the capstan moved the roller.
It was not a success.
So I ordered a new pinch roller from fixyouraudio.com, which you can see above on the left. There is a significant difference on the surface compared to the original on the right. This should grip the tape much better.
After attempting to get the roller out from the front of the deck, it turned out to be easier to get at it by removing the transport. This only requires removing 4 screws and it's out. The roller pops out of its housing and back in again easily.
With the new pinch roller in place, things are looking a lot better. No more muffled audio, and the wow & flutter measures a lot better. With the old pinch roller I was measuring 0.4% RMS (and around 0.95% peak), with the new roller we're down to about 0.08%. This is still a bit off the manufacturers spec of 0.05% that this deck should be capable of, but it is nearly 20 years old. I doubt I'd be able to hear the difference so I'm going to call this a win.
Comentários