Spent a few hours going over the Pioneer CT-F950 cassette deck. I wicked all the solder off the switch connections, cleaned the board, and resoldered them all. I also went back over the areas of the board where I reflowed some of the connections that didn't look quite right, and yep....I caused a solder short in the right channel, effectively shorting the signal from the tape to ground. Cleaned all those up, and it appears to work.
Here it is playing an old Van Halen tape I paid a buck for.
Sounds good through the headphones, too. All the scratchy/screechy noise the switches caused is gone, and the switches work very smoothly now.
Now I can go through the Electronic Alignment procedure, set all the levels, and test it to see if it meets specs.
After that's finished and it's all cleaned up, I think I'm going to send it down the road. I just don't trust it as far as reliability goes. I just want to put a tape in it, or make a tape with it, to listen to. I don't want this back on the bench every 3 or 4 months.....
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Sweet - Always nice to have a plan come together. Our old cassette tapes were lost in the great Torrance flood of '14 with which you're familiar, I believe.
ReplyDeleteYes, I remember The Great Torrance Flood of '14. It resulted in quite a mess. I fully expect this thing to be a bringer of grief, so it's gonna get cut from the herd and sent to the Train Station.
DeleteSimply finding tapes to play must be a challenge.
ReplyDeleteUsed prerecorded tapes are readily available. GoodWill, the ReStore, SRC Thrift and used book and record stores sell them. Blank tapes are also fairly easy to find. The high-end stuff like metal and FerriChrome tapes are harder to find, but out there.
DeleteWell done! And good luck finding a cassette that isn't messed up!
ReplyDeleteSo far so good. Most of the messed up cassettes are in landfills these days, and most of the rest have cracked storage cases. The "Test Tape" I bought for a buck works fine, except I accidentally recorded some test tones on it. One of the issues this deck has is the interlock switch to prevent you from recording over a tape with the tabs broken out is missing. In order to get it to record at all I had to jumper the switch.
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