Cassette Changer Repair 

the intro is so cheesy i cant do anything but like it.

Resurrecting an obscure piece of hi-fi equipment, full of gears and switches? Techmoan would be proud.

I wish I had just a portion of his patience. Such wonderful work there.

Not shown, the constant terror of that hair getting caught in drive belts.

I think you solved the mystery of why cassette changes never really caught on.

druaga1 looks wierd without the mustache

Weird Al Yankovic Confirmed.

Your *PATIENCE* is the true star of this Session. I am in awe!

7:08 for the magic mains plug that disconnects by itself

18:06 thats just an instant vaporwave button clearly

thank god "pt 1" wasnt in the title

The jump cut after 22:30 is my favorite thing all day. The number of times a project I’m working on ended up at that tone of voice 😂

I would have given up so many times trying to fix this. The fact someone tried to fix it and it was fixable is unusual. That opening!

Hahaha, I liked your intro, it was pretty funny! "It's been fixed with TAPE!"

*Animaniacs tape plays* +Respect

You delivered that intro perfectly! Did it take many takes?

I own the Sony TC-C5 Carousel style 5 cassette changer version and I absolutely love it! These machines definitely makes playing cassettes in 2019 cool again!

You are a brave brave man sir. I will remember your fearlessness, and spread the word...

U have a great voice ! And a great way of delivering .

I like how pioneer named tape deck "cd-deck" :P

What beautiful equipment Shelby (@Tech Tangents).. look at all that machinery.. the movement.. the precision.. the engineering.. these things were alive.. absolute beauty.. .. we have now.. a rectangular chunk of glass (smartphone) that looks like the one that everyone else has in the hand around us .. 1no- there is a non-slip spray (in my country it is called "Delta Compitt Antideslizante") to put on the belts.. you can clearly hear that you belt is skating/sliding on the engine bronze pulley).. 2nd- the tool to remove the cables it is called scissors.. LOL .. and to rejoin them soldering iron.... I never manage to removed or put any of those ribbon cables back on.. and unlike the current flat cables that they are impossible to repair.. those can be cut and re-welded.. you don't even need to insulate them.. the wires are far enough apart.. to just solder them and leave it like that... you know.. 1 or 2 Centimeters over the useless conector..

Me: Wife: Why are you playing through the commercial? Can't you skip it? Me: This is the fun part! ... keeps playing ... Me: I stand corrected, THIS is the fun part ... keeps playing ... Me: Who botched this beautiful piece of engineering and gave up half way through? Thanks for posting! This must have been hell to edit it to less than 35 minutes.

The commercial at the beginning was better than most today! Good job man!!

Wonder how much swearing had to be cut out of the video.

Left changer somehow reminds me a little of an ink jet printer head moving back and forth. I picked up one of those Pioneer changers at a local thrift about a year ago ; right side transport functioning, left not changing. May or may not be the same model ... Didn't have time to determine the reason the changer non- functional and stored the deck. I'll need to retrieve it from storage and take a second look now that I have your comments combined with the video's much clearer view of the mechanism in action. Thank you very much for posting the very interesting video !

I like how this cassette changer features Regret :p

You have the patience of a saint.

You're my man today. You helped me reach the problem of that micro stop sensor switch on the top of that slide hanger or sth. Took me 1 minute to get right by bending the metal tab towards that switch. And voilà ! Thank you, subd.

Projects like these are for me multi-month or multi-year affairs. I always do a bit and put it on the shelf, after some time became curious and come back to do another little bit and again put it on the shelf. I just don't have the patience and time to do it in one go but this method works for me pretty well.

Hocus Pocus by Focus is awesome! But it sounded slowed down a bit. Maybe the deck needs some fresh grease?

Cheers and thanks for your complete analysis of the changer mech, as I am in the middle of repairing one and was a bit stymied, even with the service manual. But i will say this: you took the hard way in removing the single play and changer transports. the single will actually come out without dropping the face, and the changer transport is just four screws after removing the shield without removing the changer. I just did the belts on both the changer and single transport. Forceps are advised, but a piece of stiff wire like a paper clip with a hook to grab the belt will do. After cleaning off the goo, the belt change and re-installation took about 40 minutes. The single deck works great now. Can't say that about the changer transport as the I am hitting the same issues you are with it loading and not stopping. It also will not go back to rest and there is a cassette trapped in it's clutches! :D

I love your tenacity. I would have quit in day 2... one of your best videos so far

18:07 Fool! You just unleashed the creepypasta edition of the tape. Put it back now before you bleed hyperrealistically.*-

I have not seen on in a thrift store for say over 10 years now. Most of them was 100% dirty, broken, beat up, plastic floating around in them and seemed horrible to repair. Now after watching your video about the belts. I can't tell you how many BPC decks I have thrown away because the belt was impossible to get at. Without a completed tear down. Once again stuff from 50's, 60's, 70's and early 80's. Pull the top of and remove a screw or two. perhaps a wheel weight and boom. Access to belt for replacement. Plus easy to grease spots too.

Nice work. I know what you mean about expecting worse with those. I had the jvc carousel tape changer I got at a flea market for 10$. I knew I was screwed when I took the carousel out and found someone had added a detector switch in a very weird place with hot glue, parts were cut and melted and there was horrible botchery on the control board. If I remember right it couldn't find it's home position but could load cassettes and play them if you forced it. Held on to it as long as I could but had to chuck it out.

You owning the Animaniacs theme on cassette is reason enough to subscribe to your channel.

Imagine the pain some of the engineers went through designing this beast, yikes tortured souls..

I think this tape deck alone accelerated the advent of MP3's or any other form of a vehicle of delivering music in a less absurd design as this thing. You have some serious patience and an uncanny ability to diagnose and fix things.

The extra mechanism for the tape changing has its own belt and fragile plastic gears? I'm so sorry

Crap, I've called but the number is out of service... I suppose the offer is over. Damn, I wanted one... :(

this is a LOT more interesting than ANYTHING on TV! I'm addicted.

At first I was thinking this wasn't worth repairing either, and I don't think I would have bothered with it. But I like your non-waste attitude and congratulate you on fixing it, and if you don't want to keep it, you should earn yourself some nice bux by selling it back out as a good unit!

That's a beautiful mechanism, I always enjoy seeing this kind of over-engineered single purpose thing. The most frustrating part of repairing devices like this is taking it apart (and seeing a spring bounce out of nowhere), trying some maybe-this-works fix and having to put it all back together, for it to be able to do what it's supposed to, only to find out your ingenious fix did bupkis. Or snapping some aged 1mm thick plastic clip that practically holds the entire universe together and game over. Or in the worst case you may just observe the gadget putting end to its misery in front of your own eyes.

Now you know why most repair shops refused tape decks! They were rarely economical to have repaired outside of warranty..which kinda makes you feel sorry for whoever had to sit and do the warranty repairs at Pioneer! Eek! D:

+1 for the intro alone.

I bought one which is a little better designed. It's not dual deck, its a CT-M6R. Having seen the design flaws you mentioned, I've noticed that mine has some addressed. The changing of the belts is partially obstructed by that metal plate cover. the M6R doesn't have this, meaning the belts are clearly visible and accessible from the back once the unit's cover is off. Its got a fairly good tape transport mechanism. The belt itself for the tape transport(not tape shell transport) is a ribbon/flat belt, which may be less prone to slippage due to higher surface area against the capstan flywheels and possibly less wear due accordingly, it also has two motors. One for the tape winding spindles which are direct drive from the motor via cogs and another motor for the two capstans which encompases the ribbon belt drive to link the speed of the two capstans. This design means that the FF/REW function can be higher speed and less prone to wear affecting the performance. This higher ff/rew speed however mandates an extra sensor aside the tape head which I think detects the end of tape to give it half a chance of saving the tape from being ripped off the spool due and primarily it reduces the changeover time from one side's content to the other as the full leader tape does not need to be played. Mine wasn't working either... I found that the white ribbon to the tape shell transport had the end wire dry jointed where the ribbon connects to the cassette shell carrier as power to the motor wasn't connected. Lucky for me I guess the teeth weren't chewed from this fault, because the motor just stopped moving with the lack of connection to it. Another problem I had was an earth noise accompanying the music. I poked around looking at earth wires missing or unconnected and to no avail. In the end I found that earthing the changer cage to the units main chassis did the trick. The problem of the inaccessible heads is a difficult one to remedy at design time because the changer must have front access to the heads and its either you or the changer that gets the access. One oversight for this unit was the Dolby manually switched. This means that the cassettes you play must all be recorded in the same Dolby system. Later on the CT-W504RS dual well deck had logic that automatically selects the best playback setting depending on the noise profile of the tape being played. This would have been very useful in this deck because any tapes can be put into the tray and they might need different settings. At least they could have put a dolby settings button on this unit's remote control. One thing I noticed on this unit was that it has an extra sensor right asside the playback heads. It seems to be an optical sensor that detects the leader tape of the cassette, making for a smaller wait time at the end of one side and the start of the next side to play. It also helps the unit to stop rather than ripping the tape right off the spool as the very fast rewind of the twin motor version can be tortuous on the leader tape as it hits the end of the tape. One way around is to access the heads with very long cotton bud tips of say 150mm. but yeah... it is a downfall of the unit. because these units are designed for hours and hours of play in a session without the need to touch them, the heads are likely to suffer wear due to high usage compared to say a dual well or single well. So I'd always recommend swapping the heads of a second hand unit for one that is not a 6 cassette changer. I appreciate the time it took you to work on this , having done similar to these units. incidentally on my unit the long gear track that was worn on yours is located underneath the cage roof alongside the metal shaft that guides the shell transport, I think yours was in a different location , or you had the cage turned on its side. I'm going to go further with this unit, having replaced the heads I'm interested to interconnect it with a Dolby S unit so that I'm using the multi changer and transport of this M6R but I'm using the preamp and Dolby S of a dual well pioneer, thus I'll have the benefits of Dolby S and multi changer. ... Mad, yeah probably, but I too think these units are really cool. Interfacing via the cd deck synchro to the 6 disc cd changer, allows a cassette tape junkie to rapidly put 6 cd's onto 6 tapes and if all goes well, in Dolby S, which if you've heard it, does have similar punch to digital music due to the noise reduction in the 100kHz band and its designers philosophy to achieve more with less processing. nice detailed video well done to you. The item I have is one of a series of CT-M6R, CT-M5R,CT-M7R.

That reminds me, in my nan's loft is a Panasonic 50(?) disc CD changer that won't change discs. I'd love to try getting that fixed one day. It's an awesome bit of kit I'd love to have on my desk.

Another great video. Love your content, so satisfying to watch. Greetings from Brazil!

Good morning my friend here is newton! all good, I have 3 tape deck of those of 7 tapes each one different model I bought 3 one working and the other two without working but it gave me a lot of work too that is a lot of mechanics

This is the best thing I have watched on RU-vid all week! What is that awesome little screwdriver you are using. Who makes it?

That tape position on the display tho. Excellent.

Well done, I really enjoyed watching this. If this were mine, I would dismantle the front panel and clean the inside of the display. This usually results in a nice bright, sharp output.

Cassettes are awesome. I was a teenager in the 80s and cassettes were the only way you could bring music with you. CDs were a fortune and they really had not developed good CD-walkman technology at that point. Though I have lifelong hearing issues, I always thought they sounded fine. Very high quality metal tapes were available for sound that is more or less indistinguishable from CDs.

Man, just think about having a stack of these, with your entire commodore 64 cassette collection at the push of a button!

18:15, what are you talking about, that's a Disco/Death Metal compilation tape!

Extremely well done.

heh I have the exact same model dual deck cassette deck (a Pioneer CT-W604RS) as the one he shows at the beginning. Great deck, BTW, one of the few that supports Dolby S, so it was a really lucky find that I've found at Goodwill some time ago.

I'm pretty sure I've seen this video before, but the mechatronics of the deck are so interesting.

This is gonna sound weird, but where did ya get your screwdrivers? I like the mechanism to stick a bar in the end of the driver to give it more torque when unthreading the screws

why did they always use belts instead of just gears?

we need the return of the shiny hat!

What's really funny is that Dolby Noise Reduction A did exist at one point in time. It was just so ineffectual that it actually ended up mangling the sound more than it helped, so it was quickly deprecated and B followed shortly after to much better reception by the listening public.

man! you really have radio voice.

31:19 THOSE SHOTS YAAASSSS, you're doing so well with the filming of your videos lately tbh. And omg this tape deck is so great yet so terrifying. Btw how's the server working?

I just saw one of these at a thrift store, glad to know passing it up was a good idea..Not from Pioneer's best period.

have one of these - an extremely reliable unit! love the sound quality

best ad i have seen sign me up

I do like that you are appearing in your own video! You do a great job with the content.

That intro was awesome. But wait, there's more!

for what a pain in the double asterisks it was to fix, the technology was actually amazing for the time!

Dude. You have a great taste in music.

Your like a mash up of Techmoan and LGR cranked up to 11.

Great selection of music.

Best intro ever.

I loved my Pioneer multi Tape player!

The display is beautiful

Nice work..... Didn't even know they had multiplayer cassette decks.!!

Am I the only one who wants to hook this thing up to an 80s computer and use it as the ultimate data casette library?

I wanted one of these real bad when they were new.

Shut up and take my money!

This is the coolest video you have done yet.

This is the quality content I subbed for

I've never heard disco sound so good!

I used to have that dual cassette player :-)

If you ever run into a situation like that gear rail where the plastic is badly stripped you might try mixing fiberglass and epoxy resin to fill out the ground teeth and then cut them down from fresh. Fiber Glass and Epoxy Resin should be stronger than the original plastic.

Absolutely smashing that bit. Well done.

Love the intro. Also, you have the patience of a saint.

21:20 I wish my Sony deck's mechanism was that simple. I had to almost completely strip the mechanism to replace the belt.

I love that thumbnail it’s really cool

The intro like a.... Commercial

And I thought that Sony’s 90s mechanisms were the worst... clearly, Pioneer has done a “better” job in that regard. On the other hand, the most service friendly mechanism was the one in the Revox B215 (or B710, they are very similar). 4 direct drive motors, no belts, everything is mounted on a single cast alloy base. Swiss engineering at its finest.

Awesome video man, you are very tenacious 👏

I've only taken a few decks apart, but I've always found them to be an absolute pain in the ass.

I never realized how much he looks like a Weird Al ripoff, not meant in a bad way of course :D

Love that intro - hilarious! I'd say it was worth it because you got a video out of it, and don't tell me you didn't have fun on some level fixing this thing! :-) BTW, had no idea that 3D-printing drive belts was a thing.

adorable tenacity!

The old owner of that thing is me trying so hard to do something but failing in everything :c

“Legit business” classic

Pioneer made a couple different flavors of these. I have an CT-M6R (no front loading cassette, changer only) and a CT-WM62R (like yours but a different version, I guess). I bought them off of eBay years ago and both worked at the time I received them. I don’t use them to much anymore and frankly I’m a little afraid to after seeing what you went through. And . . . Thanks for doing the vid.

It would suuuuuuck if that thing ate a tape