Sony WM-D3: A Recorder Walkman

I recently purchased this walkman. This is my first recording walkman. It is a professional model of the legendary DD series. DD walkmans run on the special disc-drive mechanism, which offers very low wow & flutter. The professional models of this series are equipped with amorphous heads, which are very durable (very important for vintage collection!) and supposedly sound better than the head from a regular DD. I am not sure about the "sound better" part, but my D3 certainly has more treble than my DDII. The D3 is slightly bulkier than the DDII due to the extra recording circuitry.

My particularly D3 was refurnished by the seller with a complete overhaul and light lubrication. The electrolytic capacitors were replaced with high-end Nichicon capacitors (electrolytic capacitors do age over time). The seller did miss one thing though: the overwrite-protection mechanism was stuck due to slight corrosion. A bit deoxit freed it up easily, so no problem.

This thing is as good as a basic full-size two-head deck. It can record on either a microphone or line-in. It has a five-LED level meter, which is important for keeping the record level as high as the distortion allows. The indicator can be switched off or switched to a battery level indication mode.

For mic recording, I also bought the Sony ECM-939LT microphone (stereo) for the walkman. The recording sounds very realistic, particularly over my Elegia headphones (the headphones have amazing imaging). The line-in recording sounds great too, even though it does not have a bias knob. Both line-in and mic-in use 3.5mm aux jack, which is fine if the device is kept stationary. In practice, the aux jack can be easily moved and any slight twist of the connector can result in a loud popping sound.

The professional models include the D3, D6C, and DC2 (playback only), The latter two feature Dolby C noise reduction (D3 only has Dolby B), making them very desirable (and expensive) for collectors.

Comments

Replacing the Capacitors in my DDII

It is time to recap my Sony wm-DDII. The device is more than 30 years old and the electrolytic capacitors need to be replaced. I got some nichicon fine gold audio grade capacitors. They are much bigger than the original. It was tough but I managed to fit in four nichicon. I can not do AB comparison but I think there is a significant improvement in terms of sound. The bass goes deeper and feels more powerful. The high is also improved. It sounds more detailed and dynamic than before. I am thinking if I should replace the remaining three capacitors later. Update: The rest of the capacitors were replaced with some ELNA "audio" capacitors from ebay (they are relatively cheap). ELNA "audio" capacitors

Repair my Sony D3 Walkman

The left channel of my Sony wm-d3 stopped working. At first, the sound just went in and out. It could get back to working with some twisting and shaking. So I thought it was just oxidation building up on switches and headphone jack, but it was not the case. At some point, it just stopped working altogether. After some quick diagnosis, I found that a wire connected to the cassette head was broken. The weird part was that it looked just fine, but my multimeter said it was not connected: it must be broken somewhere along the wire. I needed to replace the whole wire. The problem was that I needed a dual wire with shielding, and the ones I could find were fat. So I made one by myself by ripping the rubber tube off the fat one and adding some heat shrink as a shell. It was still fatter than the original but at least it fitted. It is not perfect, but it works just fine now. The Original Wires (yellow and blue) The New Wires (yellow and white)

Configure Cloud Backup for my RG351M

I just spent almost an afternoon trying to perform cloud backup for my RG351M portable game console. With this, even if the microSD card dies, I should still be able to restore the game save data and the configurations. This is done by rclone. I obviously didn't come up with this. I just follow the tutorial (and fight with the unstable hotel wifi). Rclone is set up to work relatively straightforwardly with major cloud services in the west. Unfortunately, many of them (such as Google and Mega) are censored in China for various reasons. OpenDrive works though (nice). After entering the necessary information into a command window, rclone will spit out the configuration file, which I will put in the right folder in my RG351M. The first run is slow. After that, it has been reasonably fast since the software only uploads the new/modified files. Using the mobile hotspot instead of the hotel wifi also helps speed things up.

cliz305

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