Well, my second Sony TC-KE500S arrived today. I must say I am very impressed indeed. Quiet background noise, excellent stereo separation, very clear and refined reproduction of sounds, great bass, mids and high frequencies. As a devotee to both Vinyl, CD and Minidisc cassette tape has lived up to my hopes. I'm as happy listening to it as I am any other HIFI format.
I must say I checked out the owners manual for the TC-KE500S and was very pleased to notice that it is also the manual for the TC-KA1ES , which as an Sony Elevated Standard deck. Internally they are basically the same and sonicaly it shows the KE500S must have been a great bargain.
All was going well until I found it would not record. It just made a wooooo sound. Closer inspection revealed the circuit board had cracked in one place, I thought the padding was a bit light.
So now I have a dilemma, do I fix it or do I send it back. I'm tempted to buy another broken one so I can swap the boards over. I can get one with a perished belt for $20.
Scottie I am very sorry for that but when buying a mid range deck from ebay, that's the usual outcome :(
Maybe send it back, save money and go for something better - serviced - from a respected seller/shop.
Well, I have it working. I brought another rough as assholes non working one Ebay and used it's circuit board to fix mine. Odd thing one was, even the new one had a chipped off bit of circuit board on the corner. Thankfully, its an unused part of the board (fingers crossed). I think I've had it with Ebay tape decks, they do not survive the postage well at all. That's three KE500S, and all of them took some form of beating from the post man despite two of them being reasonably packed.
Did anyone ever use C120 tapes? They seemed very unreliable and were prone to snapping.
They had to be loaded with much thinner tape than say a C60 otherwise it wouldn't inside the cassette. The thinner tape would stretch quite easily with torque of many cassette mechanisms such as when changing from fastward or rewind. Manufacturers would put warnings in owners manuals and recommend not using them with their product because of this.
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@luny@mstdn.games
https://www.luny.co.uk
I must say I checked out the owners manual for the TC-KE500S and was very pleased to notice that it is also the manual for the TC-KA1ES , which as an Sony Elevated Standard deck. Internally they are basically the same and sonicaly it shows the KE500S must have been a great bargain.
So now I have a dilemma, do I fix it or do I send it back. I'm tempted to buy another broken one so I can swap the boards over. I can get one with a perished belt for $20.
Maybe send it back, save money and go for something better - serviced - from a respected seller/shop.
Well here it is, looking good and sounding great.
Amplifiers seem not to survive the post well either.
"Do you want a bag on yer 'ead?"
"Do you want woofers and tweeters?"
@luny@mstdn.games
https://www.luny.co.uk
Do you want the one with ram or rom? Was a question my mum said she was asked when she was considering our Spectrum.
A bag on my head will do me fine, can I wear it home ?
Ha ha, I'd take RAM any day. ;)
How many Watts with that?
@luny@mstdn.games
https://www.luny.co.uk
They had to be loaded with much thinner tape than say a C60 otherwise it wouldn't inside the cassette. The thinner tape would stretch quite easily with torque of many cassette mechanisms such as when changing from fastward or rewind. Manufacturers would put warnings in owners manuals and recommend not using them with their product because of this.