Biking on the City Creek canyon road

With a new electric bike, I was suddenly motivated to bike around the city. I "accidentally" biked to the beautiful city creek canyon. With proper pavement, it was a joy to bike through the canyon. The road went very high. Without the electric assist, a less-athletic person like me would not be able to climb up there. Because of the altitude, it was quite chill up at the top. It is April now and the snow has melted down the valley where we live, but as I biked up into the canyon, I started seeing snow - from a thin layer to a few inches thick. Truly interesting.

Biking by the state capital. The road was built by a cliff.

Going into the canyon. Rich people build their houses by the canyon.

The entrance. Vehicles are generally not allowed beyond this point.

Restroom by the canyon road

I can see some snow up in the mountain.

Little creek by the road

The water factory

Snow snow snow

On my way back

Comments

Aiwa XK-009 overhaul

I won the yahoo auction for the legendary Aiwa XK-009 at about 45000 yen. It is considered to be the very best aiwa cassette deck from aiwa. Although it was working, as expected, there were some issues. The biggest problem was that it suffered from unusually high w&f, which was very audible. The previous owner installed the belt in a wrong way - the belt was wrapped around a screw. The belt was left with some rails-like groves. This deck is very sensitive to the belt. So I ordered a new set of belts from fixyouraudio. It was not the best belt for this machine (the best ones are from a website called something communication). I always ordered belts from fixyouraudio. I always had good results from them and expected no difference this time. The aiwa xk-009 was quite a pain to take apart. I took apart most of it except for the fast-forward/backward mechanism, which does not affect the performance. I removed the old oil and applied new oil (crc lubricant). The all belts were repla...

Sony wm D6 repair: muting module, speed control module, belt replacement, and recap

Just score a Sony wm-D6 in a good condition. The seller sold it as junk and untested. Maybe the seller (or whoever the previous owner is) actually tried and it did not work. I pulled the trigger anyway because the price (43000 yen) was not bad even for a non-working one. When it arrived earlier today, I tried it out and I was surprised that it actually played. Of course, there are some small issues, which I found and fixed later on. Muting Module The first problem I noticed was that the sound was crackling and a bit distorted. Later on it became intermittent (on and off). That happened even when it was in record monitor mode. I thought it was due to issues at the play-record switch, but no, cleaning the switch did not help. A quick search on tapeheads forum pointed me to the muting module. And indeed, removing the muting module made it play beautifully again (w&f about 0.05%rms). Time to buy a new muting module from scribbler_92 on ebay. Update (12/15/2022): the mute module from eb...

Attempting to improve the bass on my DD walkman

I saw a post on the tapeheads forum where mihokm posted his guide for improving the bass response on the DD walkman. He pointed out that many DD models had thin bass and it can be fixed by replacing the tantalum capacitor (potentially aging and faulty) between the NF pin and the bias pin of the BA3304F preamp chip. He said if that capacitor was faulty due to its age, it could lead to a weird peak around 100 Hz, which I has experienced before. Also, he said increasing the capacitor from 10uF to 47uF could improve the bass response. While my DDII does not have the same bass issue he described (20+dB drop at 20Hz), my D3 does, so I replaced the tantalum caps on my D3. I also replaced the electrolytic capacitors (from 220uF to 560uF polymer) before the headphones socket as instructed to lower the cutoff of the high-pass filters and thus further improve the bass response (kind of a shame because the "original" ones were Nichicon gold). 220uF is fine for high-impedance headphones...

cliz305

Search This Blog