There are a lot of decks I have worked on and of course many I have not. In also working with Nakmandan who did a lot of decks at his place for me he also said the same thing as I did in terms of Aiwa decks. Aiwa may have a nice performance in some of them but they are a nightmare to work on with wires everywhere and then very congested. Over 46 years I have worked on all kinds of stuff.
Recently Dan had a BIC deck over to my bench and we found it was designed terribly by fixed ressistors where pots should be- I think Dan was going to put trimmer in it to make it adjustable- it is amazing what some companies will do to get buy just to make profit. Teac did it too in the 112, the 202 and 302 to name a few. These are junk units- I can fix the 112 but the 202 and 302 I will not take in.
There are decks that are a horrible design with regard to service. NAD is one of then. Nevertheless I do fix the 6300 as they have Sankyo transports.
A lot of Sony decks look clean and have fancy open door functions but then again are very hard to work on. This has gone over to Teac decks like the V6030 or V8030 which are built with real abstract thinking. When you have to take face plates off to get a transport out then more that just adds to the hours that is taken to repair a deck which results in very high labor cost.
Funny as it seems I like working on Tascam 122 Mk II, Mk III decks not because they are all that much better but they were built to be easy to service.
I do them all the time and yes they did not use the correct grease and in some cases have belt cam and then gear cam drive which really made no difference because the hard grease causes more problems for the gear driven deck than the belt driven one. There are a lot of decks that are nice to work on like the BX300 Nakamichi. I have found and have heard from reports from guys I work with that the esoteric decks like Revox and Tandberg are not at all friendly to service and also in Revox requires you to make a switch panel device to program the B215. The Tandberg I had here was a mess and even tough I was able to get it back together with it un-numbered cable connections which I call a stupid design, I did not find it all that great a unit to go chasing after. If you want to chase something I say a ZX7 or ZX9 Nakamichi. I have Teac Z6000 here in my collection and they work well when serviced properly but they do have a cam belt in them that goes bad and the boards may have Marcon caps which have proven over time to be like the purple caps in Technics decks.
The Z6000 is one of the best Teac made but they did not have access to the Nakamichi Sendust heads which all Technicians know you can not beat the Nakamichi head design. It is their heads that make the big difference not the rest of the decks as the Dragon is built with a plastic frame and multiple board layers. The Z6000 is superior in construction in this as well as the C-1 and even C-3RX but again they don't have that Nakamichi heads. Their low end CD-1 from Nakamich was a bucket design and terrible to have to do repair work due to the whole board has to come out to get to the parts- they then turns into a basket case and how are you suppose to work on that?
Keep in mind the "better" Tascam 122 Mk III has many fewer pots inside so that it is not superior to the Mk II but a cheapen out version of the Mk II.
They should have left that Mk II design in there and improved on it rather than tried to find a way to get away with a better deck that was with fewer adjustments- fewer adjustments mean it does not work as well with all the tape types and Chrome and Metal are a single bias adjustment in the Mk III. That is a very stupid mistake and I would never have approved that. I wonder who was in charge over there Engineers or Marketing?
As most of you know I report what I see regardless of brand or maker. The Z7000 is a nightmare to work on as other than a circuit description book we have no way to know what the thing is doing. Many of then do not record and it is due to the Auto Cal chip that is in the way. I have not found the answer as it would probably take a lot of time but it most likely is a bad cap somewhere as a lot of them are like that- probably a Marcon.
You know it is with age that we find out the true nature of these decks and how good they are- all in all Teac did a pretty good job except when they went chasing profits as their number one goal- then things went south. Look what they make today- a deck with a spec of .25% W&F. How can you offer this when you are competing with digital devices with 0% wow and flutter? Stupid again.
Recently Dan had a BIC deck over to my bench and we found it was designed terribly by fixed ressistors where pots should be- I think Dan was going to put trimmer in it to make it adjustable- it is amazing what some companies will do to get buy just to make profit. Teac did it too in the 112, the 202 and 302 to name a few. These are junk units- I can fix the 112 but the 202 and 302 I will not take in.
There are decks that are a horrible design with regard to service. NAD is one of then. Nevertheless I do fix the 6300 as they have Sankyo transports.
A lot of Sony decks look clean and have fancy open door functions but then again are very hard to work on. This has gone over to Teac decks like the V6030 or V8030 which are built with real abstract thinking. When you have to take face plates off to get a transport out then more that just adds to the hours that is taken to repair a deck which results in very high labor cost.
Funny as it seems I like working on Tascam 122 Mk II, Mk III decks not because they are all that much better but they were built to be easy to service.
I do them all the time and yes they did not use the correct grease and in some cases have belt cam and then gear cam drive which really made no difference because the hard grease causes more problems for the gear driven deck than the belt driven one. There are a lot of decks that are nice to work on like the BX300 Nakamichi. I have found and have heard from reports from guys I work with that the esoteric decks like Revox and Tandberg are not at all friendly to service and also in Revox requires you to make a switch panel device to program the B215. The Tandberg I had here was a mess and even tough I was able to get it back together with it un-numbered cable connections which I call a stupid design, I did not find it all that great a unit to go chasing after. If you want to chase something I say a ZX7 or ZX9 Nakamichi. I have Teac Z6000 here in my collection and they work well when serviced properly but they do have a cam belt in them that goes bad and the boards may have Marcon caps which have proven over time to be like the purple caps in Technics decks.
The Z6000 is one of the best Teac made but they did not have access to the Nakamichi Sendust heads which all Technicians know you can not beat the Nakamichi head design. It is their heads that make the big difference not the rest of the decks as the Dragon is built with a plastic frame and multiple board layers. The Z6000 is superior in construction in this as well as the C-1 and even C-3RX but again they don't have that Nakamichi heads. Their low end CD-1 from Nakamich was a bucket design and terrible to have to do repair work due to the whole board has to come out to get to the parts- they then turns into a basket case and how are you suppose to work on that?
Keep in mind the "better" Tascam 122 Mk III has many fewer pots inside so that it is not superior to the Mk II but a cheapen out version of the Mk II.
They should have left that Mk II design in there and improved on it rather than tried to find a way to get away with a better deck that was with fewer adjustments- fewer adjustments mean it does not work as well with all the tape types and Chrome and Metal are a single bias adjustment in the Mk III. That is a very stupid mistake and I would never have approved that. I wonder who was in charge over there Engineers or Marketing?
As most of you know I report what I see regardless of brand or maker. The Z7000 is a nightmare to work on as other than a circuit description book we have no way to know what the thing is doing. Many of then do not record and it is due to the Auto Cal chip that is in the way. I have not found the answer as it would probably take a lot of time but it most likely is a bad cap somewhere as a lot of them are like that- probably a Marcon.
You know it is with age that we find out the true nature of these decks and how good they are- all in all Teac did a pretty good job except when they went chasing profits as their number one goal- then things went south. Look what they make today- a deck with a spec of .25% W&F. How can you offer this when you are competing with digital devices with 0% wow and flutter? Stupid again.
Last edited:
