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).
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...
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