Really enjoying the deck so far. Admittedly, I need to feed more info into this thread and finish up on my Onn Groove tape test review too.
Was struggling with some RFI issues which were driving me nuts, that I've finally tackled with a new home-brewed 'foil' barrier situated next to my wireless tower in the same room. So now the noise issue has been mitigated. The noise issue was also interfering with my Sugar Cube and on that front, I've learned now to simply unplug the Ethernet cable to it until I see on the SC forums that a valuable firmware update is available. Also moving my amp onto a new platform to free up an addition shelf for this particular deck.
The deck records & plays back really well although I haven't tried a metal tape on it yet ... but Type I - III are working damn good so far and became markedly better after I changed out the belts. The heads in this mystery deck look factory fresh to my eyes... so I think it's safe to say that it wasn't used much at all.
I've tried a Sony HF-X, a TDK SA-X and a Sony FeCr (circa 1982) and I've now reacquainted myself with just how finicky those particular FeCr tapes were back-in-the-day. The thing I forgot about was this: Record in Type III for Bias and EQ but then playback with the EQ lowered back down to Type I to get that
boost in clarity without introducing any noise. The car audio environment really benefited from this. That was that 'trick' to get FeCr to sound amazing. Back when I used Sony FeCr for pretty much everything, that was something I had discovered using my Dad's JVC three-header and had totally forgotten about. Now that I've got a Sony three-header from the same era, I can see that this wasn't a JVC problem but simply a FeCr peculiarity.
Also surprisingly impressed with Dolby B... which I haven't used in ages. How this deck maintained it's Dolby alignment after 4 decades blows my mind.
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Got a lot going on beyond the confines of my stereo system for the past several weeks, so I'm sort of plodding along...