cliz305

 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...

 I bought a test tape from ebay from seller ss72post:  https://www.ebay.com/itm/125443310728 It contains multiple useful tunes. It was made from a recently serviced zx-7. People on the forum said this is still no good for head alignment because any tape made from a normal commercial deck will have narrow track widths which can affect reading based on the head height. Supposedly, only test tapes with full track width can solve this problem. Nevertheless, this should work for now. I used it to collibrate my cr-5. Dolby level was corrected (just slightly). Head alignment was adjusted. Somehow, tapes made back when I was in the US still sounds fine on it (probably the alignment was close) (metallica the black album). Tapes made in the past months are no good though (either due to the travel or my misadjustment at some point).  I will put time on the tapes i made from now on (and deck name too since I got an aiwa xk-009 recently). The first one will be 11/27/2022 . Important u...

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...

 I made a test tape with 315Hz tone at 0dB with my Nakamichi CR-5. According to the sony service manual for DDII, I am supposed to adjust the pots so that the output voltage at test points is 32mV (my previous value was about 36mW), so I did that. However, it actually sounded worse after the adjustment. The middle was muffle and turning off the dolby made things much better. That reminded me of my D3 which was the opposite with big middle. The level pots in my D3 had been set to quite high to match the meter of device (to 0dB) (This might not be correct as different manufacturers could have different meter standards). I speculated that maybe reducing the pot level caused the dull mid (Dolby error). So I increased the output to max on left (55mV) and indeed, the mid was back. Turning the dolby on and off gave relatively small change compared to before. So what is going on? According to the forum post ( https://www.tapeheads.net/threads/p-4-l300-flux-density.8179/ ), the sony referen...

 The previous owner replaced the broken lamp with blue LED (with resistors to reduce the voltage). That works but is quite ugly to me. I bought some 12V lamp from amazon (halogen?) (intended for car dashboard) ( uxcell Instrument Light 12V T3   計器灯 12V T3 イエロー 自動車 車内 ダッシュボード ). Nice stuffs. Works out great (need to remove the resistor installed by the previous owner). Note: without the lamps installed (or with only one or two lamps), the voltage seems too high (15V without lamps and extra resistors if memory served), but with all lamp installed, voltage drops to only about 10.5V. Seems pretty safe and it is bright enough.

Two big boxes of used TDK AD (117 tapes) and AR (44 tapes) just arrived. Most of the tapes are about 45min. The seller repeatedly said that the condition was bad, but they looked quite good in my eyes. Indeed, I did some quick tests with 10kHz and I am not seeing any noticeable dropout. In the description, the seller was mainly talking about the labels being wrong or written and the lack of protection knobs (which does not bother me). So all of a sudden, my base line just jumped from tdk D to AD (or even AR). I do wish there were more longer tapes in the bunch though. The fact that AD and AR have different level sensitivity also make it difficult for me to switch between the two (my deck does not have level calibration knob on the front panel).

 A legendary amp from the 70s. My new amp, Yamaha CA-2000. Have not tried the speaker out yet (the speakers are on their way here). The seller said the VU meter and broken capacitors were replaced. Unfortunately, one of the legs was broken during shipping (not enough wrapping!). That should be an easy fix though.  The colors do not match...   Also not sure if it is ok to stack my tape deck on the top of the amp. This amp has some great features for taping. I can play back from a particular source while recording from any source (except the tape deck itself). I can also record from deck 1 to 2 or the other way around. The record out select switch is passive, so the amp does not have to be on for the recording. The VU meter can be set to either speaker out or record out. Updates: Replacing the VU meter lamps on my Yamaha CA-2000  Update: there is crosstalk between the inputs channels. I checked the resistance between two inputs, which was about 1megaohms. Resistan...

Some maxell ur in a Japanese supermarket. I bought a pack. I will try them when I have some time. The tape path is browner (lighter in color) than 1990d. Sensitivity is similar 1990 d (it is slightly louder<1dB). The balance between the two channel is slightly different than my D (~1dB). I can turn up the record volume very high without losing much signal (seems to be better than 1990 d in this aspect). However, I have to turn the bias toward negative by a lot for 10khz at -20db (for the same bias position as d, 10khz is like 4db lower) (. Relatively stable high frequency. Weird occasional dropout at 10khz (loses up to 2db after like 1 second) at left channel (similar to what I see in some old tapes). It might be affected by the local humid weather. Sounds good over all.