My DCC Deck Repair Didn't Quite Go as Hoped...
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- Опубліковано 28 вер 2024
- Digital Compact Cassette was a format from the early 1990's that didn't quite work out. What also didn't quite work out was my attempt to get a Philips DCC 900 deck operational again.
The DCC Museum: www.dccmuseum.com
Sources:
Technics RS-DC10 photo: i.pinimg.com/o...
"Matsushita, Philips to Make New Cassette," Los Angeles Times, July 6, 1991.
"Consumers follow CES to the letter," Chicago Tribune, June 5, 1992.
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So sorry it did not work out. We are often called the last resort. It might indeed be better to just buy a restored player, but that would not have made this great video. The second generation players (DCC 300,305,600,380,91 and 450 f.i.) do not have the capacitor issues. All players need work, no matter what generation. Part of the plastic 90ies construction as well. Thanks again for your support and mention on your channel. We will do what we can do get you a working player.
Love my refurbed 951 I bought from Dr DCC a few years back.
Instantly thought of Dr DCC. Usually the videos I’ve seen of his (Dr DCC), it’s the caps that have to be replaced, as well as usual things like belts and such.
What kind of future proofing do you recommend for a 91?
@@MichaelGisiger Belts, pinch rollers and for sure the gear.
@@DRDCC Thanks, I already took care of the belts. Will look into the rest.
Hi Colin, soldering nerd here. A couple of points:
1. That first board is definitely repairable. From the images you showed it's the kind of thing I could do in an hour or two. It would look a little messy when done but is preferable to trashing a board.
2. SMD caps should be easy to solder quickly. The trick is to tin one pad, place the cap on top with a finger to steady it, and melt the solder. The cap will drop into the pool of solder. Then you can go to the other side, and solder that with a second or two of heat. Shouldn't need more than two seconds of heat on each pad.
Yeah, I've done lots of SMD soldering work also. I agree that board should be salvageable - there's no tight pitch components that I can see and it looks like most traces are on the outside. It'll be ugly, but could be salvaged with care and some nice 30 gauge (or less) wire wrap wire. Or that ultra fine enamel wire Louis Rossman likes so much. Maybe send it to somebody like Adrian Black from Adrian's Digital Basement? Somebody motivated enough could probably even just recreate the board. It looks like it would probably be 2 or 4 layers - pretty straight forward. For 4 layers, the 2 inner ones would probably be just power and ground planes (typical PCB practice).
Yeah, SMD caps aren't hard to solder. I use the same technique. I find hotter irons are actually better - you can keep the heat on for very short periods of time and get the joint done before the heat even conducts through the pad rather than burning the pad to death with an iron that's just barely hot enough.
I agree.
And Colin, try one of these: "Dual Headed Horse Hair Anti-Static Brush PCB Cleaning" (great to clean PCBs with IPA).
I'm not the best at soldering, but I think at this stage I would have given that board a go. Yes it looks like 20+ bodge wires needed, but I've seen worse boards on UA-cam. Beyond economic repair? Probably, but that's the whole point of restoration, it isn't always economic.
Great effort to address the issues on the boards, sad to see you couldn't succeed at it but I learned a lot about DCC internals with this video, hope you have better luck with DCC in the future!
techmoan: "Give me some belts and contact cleaner ... there you are now working!".
Techmoan sticks to equipment from an era before the use of the dreaded SMT capacitors. The reason the through hole ones are more reliable is that the board shields them from the heat during soldering
@@MrDuncl Techmoan did do a DCC video. I believe he acquired a working deck though.
@@patrickcoco6205 True. VWestlife got a DCC deck as well but had to get the DCC Museum to fix it for him.
Techmoan has extremely limited repair skills. I don't think he can solder or use a multimeter. He seems to just wait around for machines in working condition, new-old-stock, or where the seller's description indicates that belts are the problem.
@@3rdalbum By his own admission. my post was just a nod to all those techmoan fanboys (such as myslef)
The DCC was a truely cursed format. I had the Technics deck and it failed under four years, same thing no sound. I was glad to see the back of my deck. I spoke to an engineer who said if you ran a dirty old analog type 1 cassette through your deck, then a new DCC tape it would strip the head as it was that fragile.
The irony is an analog cassette deck with a type 2 or 3 tape is capable of good audio, with Dolby C 80-90db dynamic range and up to 22khz on a good deck (I have a Yamaha deck which is excellent). Wow and flutter can't be totally eliminated but should be fairly low on a good, well serviced machine.
Super bummed you couldn’t get it working. Even with the video title, I expected a positive outcome. Very impressed with the effort you put in, though, and thanks for sharing.
Thanks for sharing the story. Other UA-camrs say that posting "it still doesn't work" is not good, but I'm glad you did.
I'm sorry that the repair/restoration didn't go as planned but I really enjoy watching how you go through and troubleshoot. It is rewarding to me to be more patient and take my time in life.
Great work showing a honest view of things! Specially where all other channels are more crazy about happy endings and feel-good focus.
I don't own a DCC, never owned one, and have no plans to buy one but I still enjoyed watching your video. I've been through similar experiences when I repaired both my McIntosh DVD and CD players.
I am not a DCC expert, but since you do have a scope, my suggestion would be to trace out the signal and see at what point you lose it.
Since you have a schematic/service manual that wouldn't be hard to do.
That already tells as so much more in what direction we have to look and think.
But I also don't know if you have the time and patience to troubleshoot this any further?
edit; reading the comments; yes along the same lines check all the oscillators and such as well
I just noticed watching, and listening to, this video that the tone and cadence of your voice is fit for narration and just makes me feel assured nothing bad is ever going to happen.
Sometimes it just never works out. I am sorry to hear of your problems. I have a similar problem with my car stereo and have already bought one new CD changer. Some of the old tech others loved and we want to love, just won't be available to us latecomers. I also wanted a DCC deck but realised that the cost had already reached silly money. I agree with all of your conclusions.
Unfortunate ending, but you've managed to get a great story, and some valuable experience. At least you gave it a try! Keep making some of the best videos out there.
Having spent a lifetime in electronic repair work, the one type of component
i dislike the most is surface mounted components.
These were introduced to make manufacturing faster and cheaper, but not
repairing pcb's that are damaged by leaking capacitors.
Once the acidic paste leaks under other components, then sits there for a few
years, it destroys everything in its path.
Sorry to hear that you have spent a lot of time and money trying to get a working
player.
I have often made the same mistake, especially with Laserdisc playes, thinking
that they only need a few more capacitors to get it working.
It's good to hear that there are people like DR DCC with the experience to return
repairable samples to full working order.
Experience and the knowledge to know when to stop fitting expensive parts in
a no hope repair counts for a lot.
Both models made in Japan by Marantz, the third partner in development and part of Philips at the time. The newer models with decks that were made by Philips themselves in Austria, didn't suffer from the Japanese leaky SMD electrolytics problem that many camcorders suffered from as well.
Your predicament reminds me a lot of my own experience trying to get my Sony TCK96R analog cassette deck working right. Funny thing is it has the same problem as your DCC deck has when playing analog tapes - one channel is way too quiet. I've replaced caps, transistors, made all the adjustments I can think of or find in the service manual, and nothing ever fully fixed it. I gave up too, after having spent probably 30-40 total hours on it. Win some, lose some I guess. I still have my deck sitting at the bottom of my audio rack in case I ever find someone who can fix it right, but it's beyond me. btw, I worked at J&R Music World in NYC in the 90's and we closed out these DCC decks for $99. I remember thinking "should I buy one? Nah..." Always been one of my big regrets.
Does your deck have the green nichicon Bipolar Muse capacitors on the output board? One of them maybe shorted.
@@JD-lk7im I'll check when I have some spare time. I'm sure I have some photos I took when I was working on it that I could find in the meantime and that might tell me something. I went through so many tips that other people gave me at the time and none of them panned out. But I don't remember that one specifically, so thanks, and if I see those I'll just go ahead and replace them and see what happens.
Sony MD killed this format. I still have mine years later and works perfectly. Great Video!
Yeah. I remember watching a video on this maybe a couple years ago (probably Techmoan) that included video from the release demo of both formats.
Sony: Digital audio, recordable, random track access, teeny tiny little disc.
Crowd: THE FUTURE IS NOW!
Philips: Digital audio, recordable, individual track access (... pause for fast-forwarding to track skip... ... ...... ..... * cough * ..... ..... ), small cassette-sized shell.
Crowd: Oh, uhm.... hm. Yeah, erm, ...cool?
@@nickwallette6201 Watch the DCC documentary on the UA-cam channel of the DCC museum. DCC was not intended to compete with MiniDisc, but was intended as successor to the analog cassette. In 1988, it was an excellent idea. But they lost a lot of time because Seagate didn't help with the heads, as they promised. Then all of a sudden, tape recorders (even high quality ones) became really cheap so it became impossible to sell DCC recorders at competing prices. They missed their window of opportunity (and didn't do a very good job of marketing the system), but they still made a lot of money on patents: pretty much all audio data compression methods that exist today are based on inventions done by Philips for DCC.
Not MD killed the format, it was the analog CC. Only a few people cared about sound quality. Price and easy to handle are more important. In the 90's there was a cassette deck in every house.
@@JacGoudsmit I have always felt that they got the backwards compatibility the wrong way around. Given that just about every car came with a normal cassette deck what was needed was a cassette that would play in a normal cassette deck but give better quality sound in your home Hi-Fi. Hi-Fi VHS does exactly that trick.
@@MrDuncl They should have started with a portable recorder like Sony did with their MiniDisc. The DCC museum has a prototype portable that was never released; the one that's often shown in pages and ads with the "Pretty Woman" soundtrack in it. They should have finished developing that.
Because the first DCC recorder couldn't record analog cassettes, it would have been necessary for early adopters to make extra space in their audio system because DCC didn't fully replace their old cassette deck.
Also the promise of editing song titles didn't get realized until 2 years after the format first came out, and then that feature was incompatible with the first recorders.
DCC-text was a feature that Philips forced on prerecorded cassette manufacturers but never took off.
Philips made a lot of mistakes with DCC and of course there was no way that it would outlast disc based formats such as MiniDisc and CD-R / CD-RW.
Hated to see it end up going south, here's hoping an answer emerges ... Always enjoy your work, regardless, thank you for sharing!
We love the sound of the DCC!!! We mixdown our recorded multi track music from our TASCAM DP-32 direct to DCC, and the quality is so good we do not master our final product! You can hear our albums on our UA-cam channel.
Hey Colin, great video as always. Man I feel for you after watching this video. Well done for giving it your all and at least you managed to get a good informative video out of it that could help potential buyers think twice about getting into the format. Look forward to more great content in the future and keep up the great work mate 👌👍 All the best. Jamie
Been there before with vintage hardware. Walkmans and old computers have bitten me many many times. Sometimes you win some, sometimes you loose. But at least along the way you learn something new! Still loved the video as it's featuring something that is not common at all.
In one or more double sided pcb when traces corroded check for continuity between the levels of a suspected trace.Also try to resolder smd components because there are cases that cutted in an edge and this getting lifted by the soldering tip.And check not only the removable pcb but the mainboard also.The smd chips are prone to dry joins and is good to be resoldered.Every microswitch inside the mechanism of course has be checked for good continuity.
Damn. Such a cool device. It's so sad that you didn't repaired it.
Awesome video. Glad everything failed for entertainment purposes. And hope you find a great deck soon.
I would LOVE to take a crack at this. I listened to your video while working and took a peak in now and again so it's likely I've missed some of your troubleshooting nuances, but from a skim over the service manual it doesn't appear as though you can safely say the whole problem comes from the Read/Write board. There could be issues with the Digital board too. Things I would want to see, since you have the analog part partially working starting with that, is if you put in a tape with a standard 1 kHz 0 dBu sine wave on left and right channels at the same level, what do the analog outputs look like on the oscilloscope at the output of the Read/Write board? If they are uneven there, then yes there is a problem with the Read/Write board. However consider the feedback circuitry as potentially being faulty on either channel as well - there could be too much feedback on the right channel or too little feedback on the left. If you have a consistent signal on the left and right channel you can continuously follow said signal from the input side of the board all the way to the output and try to find the point where the signals vary. I know I'm optimistically fresh at this but I hope you don't give up just yet! Next time you pick up the project go all in for a deep tracing session!
Seeing that kind of damage in shipping is sadly very common. I ordered a clock/radio with a cassette player in it and it arrived 2 weeks late and had been destroyed in shipping. I got it somewhat working but could not look at it without feeling bad. It died completely a month later. I have only had one item delivered in the mail since then, instead opting to find everything locally as the chances are far lower that it will get destroyed with me bringing it back home. If possible, I suggest trying to find things locally, but I understand that with this hobby, that is not exactly easy.
I fortunately read about the bad capacitors of the DCC900 before I bought one. Bought a DCC91 here in Germany instead, it's been part of a shelf hifi system. Installed new belts and it plays fine.
That's a later generation DCC, which didn't have the bad caps in it.
Sent it to Denmark and will try to fix it for you, I think I can do the job, the job on the pcb from dcc museum was pretty bad, sorry for saying it.
And of course I will do it for free 😎
Consumers didn't bite on DCC, they already knew what happens to any kind of tape over time or when you leave it in a hot car. CDs looked like they would hold up better so that's what music buyers decided to get. For pro use and for consumers who wanted a reel-to-reel replacement DAT was the format that had better adoption and most brands of gear also went with DAT. Shortly after that CD-R came along that could do both Audio and Data, game over for tape. VHS HiFi was analog but my favorite reel-to-reel replacement because of how many hours you could get on it and the "tone". Some of the JVC VHS HiFi units solved the head switching noise issue and really sounded fantastic. The only place I remember seeing DCC was at Radio Shack, they had a gift for picking every loser possible, maybe that's why there is no more Radio Shack.
I have that exact same one. I used to record Music Choice from my DSS back in the 90’s. LOL!
It's never a failed project if you learned a lot in the end.
11:46 - Definitely a big mood for when a project isn't going well there.
you did the best! Keep going to next project!
I would double check all the capacitor values. There could’ve been a difference between the originals and the pack that came with the second unit. I’d also triple check the power supply voltages. It’s possible you have some caps that are bad inside the power supply, and even just a small variation could be causing something odd. It’s worth some measurement with the voltmeter.
Sorry to hear you did not have any luck with your DCC deck (I am feeling blessed with the impulse purchase of my own 951 without any knowledge on the generations or travails of issues) Thank you for the video; pretty sure a lot of DCC aficionados will find it useful in opening up the deck and locating stuff for cleaning and repair! Who cleaned up the first board? (Looks like somebody took a chisel to it)
It's a bummer you couldn't play that Cathy Dennis DCC...
I guess you could say that, when it came to getting this deck to work, there were just... Too Many Walls. 🕶
Good luck with getting a working deck. The one I got had good PCBs but the head and loading system were bad. (Due to the original seller’s less than stellar packing) anyway Ralf is taking care of it. And yes this is a thing you have to be really committed to putting money in if you especially if you buy a 1st Gen deck. Hopefully mine will be working in a few weeks.
And now it’s working! The head on mine was bad and the tray was too damaged to fixed. So I shelled out the dough to replace those parts and Voilà! My deck is back in business after probably 25 years of sitting around! The only downside (and this seems to apply to DAT) is drops outs in the audio with certain tapes that are now almost 30 years old.
This Does Not Repair must be the new name of this channel. lol.
Certainly starting to feel that way!
I have that deck at the moment - and it plays digital tapes fine (now I'm nervous and might have to check inside it).
The answer is easy and right in front of you. You are overlooking it.
A channel i watch called La Taverne de Jon-Jon did a repair on a DCC900. I feel like maybe there's corrosion under the chips?
If that's not cleaned up that could be what would be causing the playback issue because there's still corrosion under the chips that's causing the issues
Great video Mr.
The DCC's biggest mistake was using backward compatibility with compact cassette tapes. The common tape market itself killed the DCC. If you could play and record regular tapes why buy more expensive digital tapes? Unfortunately, this is what happened. Without a growing market, the development and improvement of the DCC was compromised until it finally went bankrupt. I was never a fan of digital tape because being digital CD, Mp3, DCC for me is all the same. I prefer a good and analog tape player or a turntable.
All respect and gratitude for what the DCC museum did and does but I never would have sent this device for repair, to a "museum". It was too risky for this device to be mailed three times.
Fantastic work but a shame it didn’t work out. Only question I have, and I may have just missed something you said about it, but you said you compared the boards, how do you know that the one your were testing against was producing the correct values? They could both be bad?
You forget to say one of the most IMPORTANT WARNING : Do NOT, NOT AT ALL, use a demagniser tape or tools. Even powered off, it will destroy the heads amp !!! I bought a DCC 900 in 2015, and I took me about 5 hours of labor to make it work again. I use a different method : used red alcool vinegar (i hadn't white one) rather than Isopropyl. This not only stop oxydation: it will let you hear if there is an acid corrosion with a cripy sound (if you have good hear...), This help me a lot to check if the track transfert where or not bad and have to been fill with soldering join. I did not use at all an hot air station, but 2 30watts soldering iron, one for each pad. A not leaking caps would go off within 25/30s. A dead one took at least 1 minute ! And so I know where I got to look for damaged tracks and transferts, and again Vinegar on and around the aera to be sure the oxydation had not "fly" around (often under the amplifier chipset...). Last but not least, use contact spray cleaner into EVERY adjustable pots !!! And the head film transfert connector. It was the last big problem I had.... It still has a tiny problem : when I arrive at the middle of a Digital tape, it sounds eratic, so I change of side, get back to the side I was listening and it sounds ok. It should be a motor belt replacement, but I also hear that we have to FF/RW the complete tape prior listing it. On my old album, on the last picture, you can see the benefits of spraying contact cleaner : from 5 heads not responding to All heads OK : facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10206578346207299&type=3
hey, nice video and attempt. SMD tech is always a pain.
Nice honest video is always good. Keep up the good work.
You can just twist off those caps with a pair of plyers and then remove the legs, sounds brutal but I saw this on Mr Carlsons Lab ... works very well
Is the Philips DCC 600 a reliable model?
At the time, thought DCC was a good idea for a digital, analog cassette solution, but after seeing this video and other research the past several years, glad I went Mini disc circa 1993.
DCC and Dat were just way too complicated mechanically, resulting in high cost and low reliability.
In the case of DCC, the digital audio was lossy like MD, so may as well gone MD for better reliability and lower cost, as prices for MD dropped quickly as more models and brands hit the market through 94-96.
If you were a pro in the 90s and wanted lossless audio recording, you either went Dat or a custom built PC by late 90s
Heck, just using a hifi vhs VCR for audio recording was darn good for some pros, and a lot cheaper media and decks.
By late 95 I had my first Cd burner on my PC.
So DCC was too little too late with too much cost and complexity
Great video regardless of the outcome. We’ve got to take the good with the bad and sometimes these things happen. Who knows, you might have a sudden brainwave after a midnight snack or something. Good try, great content and keep your head up - you did very well and came very far.
Hopefully you can find a later model at the end before they stopped making them.
A thought and I don't know when all companies truly stopped all at once or some countries kept making the format as in the Japanese market. I maybe running down a worn out rabbit hole.
The fact that it has a museum is awesome in itself. Most new formats like this do not.
I know keep trying is easy for me to say. I'm not putting in time and money
Try corresponding with
TECHMOAN he has a wealth of information as to find a place to look for a player that works to play your tapes. All your efforts deserves reward
I cannot even do basic repairs but I've had dumb luck at products that worked. The one thing I do vaguely remember with Dcc was it proprietor technology that had to fixed by the manufacturer because of the time period leading up to the internet and all the concerns around digital rights and manufacturing to protect their products that they only can fix or in this case not fix.Im a big fan of DAT but so far it seems to have avoided the problems these players have so far mine still works 11 years later. Remember the 1990s were bad with technology that was designed to never be repaired. That Sucks for those that make a living let alone try and salvage technology.
Find a way to get a player that works. GOOD VIDEO 😎
DCC was a nice idea, but it came too late and it was too expensive. It could never win the competition from analog compact cassettes. For the vast majority the quality of an analog cassette was good enough. Anyway I appreciate Philips' drive to make things better. Philips was much more innovative than Apple ever will be.
hi again the money is not gone i have been in this place with da88 units before best to hold on to them they will get fix some time
Did you re-align the head after swapping it?
Somewhat surprisingly perhaps, that's usually not necessary. The tape guiding pins on the head, in combination with the guiding pins in each cassette, make it so that the tape goes through over the head at an exact angle. Also the DCC system compensates for small variances in the azimuth for digital tapes, and when it plays analog tapes, because it uses two of the nine heads to read the much wider steel tracks, azimuth control is still much less critical than on analog decks. When they were new, DCC recorders were the best way to play analog tapes. Unfortunately nowadays because of aging, we don't recommend playing analog tapes in DCC recorders anymore at the DCC Museum. You will probably get excessive wow and flutter (especially on the later recorders which have more plastic) and analog tapes "shed" magnetic material on the heads which makes it necessary to clean them, and that's not easy on most recorders.
Anyway the bottom line is: the alignment of the heads in DCC recorders are mostly so the tape doesn't get damaged by going through the mechanism. On portable recorders, the heads are even mounted in a way that always makes me think someone forgot to tighten some screws.
Hi, do you have any source for spare head parts for DCC900? Thanks
You should try out Sony mini disc I bought my first one in 1994 and I still use them even in my van I have a six disc mini changer it still working wonderful and a mini disc portable one it looks like a boombox and you can pick them up for reasonable prices..
i feel your pain tried for ages with dat tape and just gave up in the end
Your infrequent fail videos are so depressing....I kind of like it. Thumbs up, first board looks salvageable, at least by Louis R. and a dab of flux!
There is a working 900 in my country with about 220 dollars, but I live in Europe, not feasible with taxes and transport.
lol that packing job. you need to double box and leave just enough of an air gap. you almost definitely packed it too tightly. use foam in the corners next time.
14:23 - Couldn't it also mean you had two bad heads? A head problem isn't really eliminated unless you can test with a known good head.
The problem with DCC heads, they're pretty much unobtanium. Plus they have to matched to their R/W board, which was done at the factory.
Aight then.
you must have a schematic of the pcb your working on. some vias don't look so good. have you tried gently sliding wirewrap wire, 30awg, into the via, to solder the top pcb to the bottom pcb? lots of ohming traces to do, pin by pin. could be you got a bad IC. hard to say.
On the L/R balance, could the potential issue be that the head is misaligned with the tape? After all, the head had been removed. Just a thought.
No. Misalignment is almost impossible with DCC heads. The level difference for analog tapes is a common problem; I think it's the non-polarized capacitors which definitely go bad just like the normal electrolytics.
How about do the head alignment?
I have a board for a DCC900 that was re-done by the DCC museum, but unfortunately the head on my unit is bad (according to the DCC musuem). If you'd like I could send it to you for experimentation.
MD Players won kinda. I feel bad for the lost cause. Every "futuristic tech" is great that is why I got into Sony MD R50. I love the feeling of listening to one set order album even when I mainly use Spotify and a little Qobuz
Hello Colin, I was wondering if you do repair on old laptops. I have a powerbook 145b that needs recapped.
There's been several vintage mac laptops on the channel.
I still listen to tapes but, when I see my deck starting to fail...i toss it and get another one. I dont even bother looking to see if its the belts im not trying to break my head trying to repair them...
When you say cont nuidy do you mean continuity? 😅
That PCB is an easy fix, I fix most of engine ecu way worst than this even existed. Please dont dump away that PCB! if you ever wanted to fix it please message me.
I'm glad you tried hard even with spending big money.
I'm not sure it's kind to say you're glad about that... Yes, it made for an interesting video for us viewers, but all he's been left with is lost time and money down the drain.
@@BilisNegra It was meant positive.
DCC = Lossy DAT. More or less. I've been sitting on a used 900 series that I got from a Thrift Store. I put a DCC in and it just starts FFWing and RRWing.
keep it up, man!
I had one. Thought I was the only one.
Slowly becoming Techmoan.
That soldering iron tip is really bad because it does not transfer much heat, you should use instead a flat sided C type one
hi keep to the makes i know and only buy decks i can fix up soundcraft 381 760 are uk reel to reel decks and are easy to fix up if the cap are the one like you have to change
i keep away i have worked on alot of audio gear over the years prices are getting silly i came back to the cassette after a long time the best way is to have them running at x2
speed like the tascam decks i have 2 tascam 248 deck that are in a very bad way one is playing only 3 3/4 ips and 7 1/2 yes 7 1/2 i put in new motors was not easy
it can do 1 1 7/8 funny thing i know that alot of cassette are not recorded right i know a man his mate was in the cassette making game love the video still bob's bit's
Just buy more DCC decks and try again. You can't give up now.
17:48 Ben Gibbard had nothing to do with your dcc tape being destroyed.
:3
Are you sure you didn't mess up head alignment when swapping heads? This would certainly explain unbalanced analogue and nonexistent digital sound even with repaired boards.
It's an Apollo 13 of a restoration, a successful failure.
I love old school Audio tech.
I used to own a nice cassette deck. REAL good audio quality.
One day, it stopped working. Opened it up and it turns out a couple tiny plastic wheels snapped in half. This was before 3D printing.Sadly, I had to throw it out.
Though you didn't get it working, that's the woes of repairing. You wont always be successful.
Could it be that there are some delaminated oscillator crystals on the board that wreck havoc?
That's a good idea!
That's my first thought too!
I would've taken the mains board out to check if everything was up to spec, just because it appeared fine doesn't mean it's working
I didn't see any talk of the smoothness of the power as well.
I like your funny words magic man
Although the start of the video seems it will end in gloom and doom and it did, but after watching almost all of your videos, I know you are not a person who easily gives up and certainly, you did not disappoint.
I had one of those tape decks. Fabulous sound, rubbish remote!
lol so even if he manages to repair the DCC, he still has to deal with the remote
@@D0NU75 for playback the remote was fine, but if you wanted to label each track you recorded off an LP with the song title, then you learned to hate that remote!
@@paulfredfield labeling songs is not even possible with the dcc900. They didn't introduce that feature until the dcc730 and dcc951, in 1994. The Technics RS-DC8 could store up to 4 texts for each song, but the user-stored texts could only be shown on those recorders, and on the latest model of the car stereo DCC player. Worst of all, the song-title editing feature was too little too late: you couldn't even enter an apostrophe!
By the way most universal remote controls of decent quality can be programmed to send Philips/Marantz "rc5" DCC codes (or rc5 MiniDisc codes -- they're the same). I use a Logitech Harmony with my DCC recorders.
@@JacGoudsmit ah yes mine was the dcc730 iirc. It went to recycling a couple of years ago after 20 years of no use! I think the recording bit rate was better than cd so a shame it was lost. But it was not a solid state format so it never had a chance.
Hello! I have two if these decks I paid a fortune for and neither work. One plays analog tapes though. I intended to fix these are you interested? I think I even have the original box for one.
I'm always so intimidated by repairs but can occasionally get things fixed when I slow myself down. Looks like a nice dcc, shame it went through such a journey.
I'm sorry you had such bad luck with DCC. At the DCC Museum we see lots of success stories but we know some enthusiasts aren't so lucky. That first recorder's read-write board was definitely too far gone to repair and we're considering making compete replaced circuit boards with all new parts except for the read/write amplifier chips.
Anyway, I see you got the right analog channel to work, so believe it or not, you were probably really close! The non-polarized capacitors also go bad on the read/write board, and if I'm not mistaken, the audio for analog playback goes through those. You can replace each of them with two polarized electrolytic caps that are double the value of the original, connected in series with the opposite poles connected to each other.
You didn't show the error display in service mode after you had fixed the via with the bodge wire, but I wouldn't be surprised if at least some of the tracks were working now, and a thorough head cleaning might have fixed it.
Also, I noticed on the second recorder the connector for the flex cable on the digital pcb looks kind of damaged. Did you try using the digital pcb from the first recorder into the second recorder?
It's really unfortunate that DCC recorders are getting pretty hard to find in the United States now. I got back into DCC around 2013 and back then it was easy to find all kinds of DCC decks for around a hundred dollars or so. Right now you would have to go to the Dutch eBay or other Dutch sales sites to find anything other than the DCC900. But of course then there's the problem that they usually only work on 220 volts.
8:11 man, those belt wheels are absurdly yellowed
plastic age
Hate to see a project not workout. However, its important to show these adventures, even if they end in failure. It shows others who want to get into repairing retro tech that sometimes there isn't always an easy fix. Sometimes, it even ends in lost money. I still enjoyed the video! Hopefully in the recent future a replacement part or idea falls into your lap!
For the sake of all that's holy use an IPA bath and a soft brush or toothbrush (type depending on situation) rather than a wipe. FAR less aggressive whilst simultaneously being FAR more reaching in its effectiveness.
Ultrasonic cleaner for the retired hardware pcb is the best way to start with
“Capacitor failure is a function of time, not usage” is the real takeaway here. I just re-belted my regular 1992 Sony cassette deck, and while it works great now, cap failure is always in the back of my mind.
I'm a BIG fan of your vids
As bad as the original board appears there is still a chance of repairing it. It may never look pretty, but to me it seems that there is still enough of it to work with. That isn't to say that there may not be other issues on the board beyond the obvious but as far as trace and pad repairs are concerned it has to be at least worth a try. I have repaired/restored lots of equipment with similar damage with more success than failures. It's all about how you value your time or how determined you are. Karl
Hey, don't give up yet! Since you got oscilloscope, why don't you try to trace to the point where it loses L channel audio. As there is wiring diagram/schematic available, I bet it's something simple
Feel your pain. I’m sending my technics boards to dr DCC next week so hopefully the postal service in this area of Minnesota treats me good. Thank you for the fun and quality videos.
How did it work out for you?
All that messing about to play an old INXS DCC cassette lol
Jest aside, i'm absolutely gutted for you :(