cliz305

 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...