Excellent work on that cassette deck! I really like your videos - they look so well put together. Here's an idea - as much as I love these old wooden boxes, I think the old Yamaha will look really awesome with a transparent plastic cover instead. That way all that beautiful craftsmanship inside will be on display.
I was given one of these back in 94 that needed a service, so belts and pinch roller. (Yes, you didn't change that, fairly standard size part too!) In about 96-97 I mixed down a studio recording that a band went on to mime/film a video to; I then took the machine with chrome tape to a cable TV editing suite where to the amazement of the crew there, I played in 4.5 mins of audio that synced perfectly, like frame perfect with the video on their Umatic machines! I still have this deck in my office and may well get round to servicing it again this year as it hasn't really been used for the last 10. The Yamaha 511S is a very well designed and built cassette deck!
The earliest decks were mostly top-load in design. Not sure what the reasoning was. Tape recorders had the same design so maybe it was just carrying over from that. All the controls and VU meters were arranged on the top. The thing is, I've never found a vintage top-loader that was ever easy to service. When they moved to front-loading so you could stack stereo components a lot of the internal layout was simplified too.
I had that Yamaha model, bought it in 1976. Was the first Hi Fi deck I ever owned. Went to the local Hi Fi shop back then, looking for a reel to reel. The salesman told me "get a cassette deck, man. They've come a long way in the last couple of years, sound really good, and about a third of the price of a Reel to reel deck". I was sold. These decks really did sound good. The lighting looked so cool in a dark room, glad you left it intact.
That was a very popular cassette configuration in the mid 1970's. What you have show, Marantz also had this. Earlier decks were more on a horizontal format making stacking components difficult. I only remember this type from my teen years and when I finally got my own system a Nakimichi, it was typical for the latter half of the 1980's.
You do it well with demagnitizer 😍💚 I am about to do same operation on a beautiful National Panasonic RS-612-US Fit new belts and fix a issue with the sound, hope that ill have same luck that you had with this beautiful Yamaha with contact cleaner 😜😄🥰
This is from the 70s. The tell is the FeCr choice for the tape formulations. Replace belts, and check any mode idler pulleys, re cap the machine with quality nichicon or similar, and clean the whole tape path, demagnetize the heads and metal parts of the tape path. Once you do that barring any noisy transistors, you're done. Anything of course address. Trying not to spoil your video.
