This is Sony PCM-1630 serial number 10101.
I have lots of these and have never seen one below s.n. 10000, or as low as this one at all, so I'll guess they started at 10000 and this is the 101th (101nd? 101rd?) made. The IC date codes are between 1983 and 1985, with most chips dated 1984 and not one IC seen in there later than 8535 (35th week of 1985, August 26th, 1985), and these are always made as entirely from Japanese chips (Hitachi, Mitsubishi, Toshiba, NEC, JRC, etc.) as possible, and they go direct (where American brands usually get ICs through distribution), so that would mean this was probably made in September 1985, making it a very, very early machine.
A famous Hollywood machine.
WOW! This is the Sony PCM-1630 CD mastering machine from Digital Magnetics mastering studio in Hollywood, California, USA. You can go to discogs com and see 443 CDs listed as having been mastered there (seems to have a lot of huge project reissues like The Doors listed there).
You can see the groovy 1980s graphics DIGITAL MAGNETICS sticker on the A/D converters card.
Until I turned this on as a quick check, and again to make the video you should be seeing above, it probably hadn't been powered on for 20-25 years.
The video is not showing recorded material on the machine, it's just showing this PCM-1630 sitting on top of the Synhouse professional CD player, the balanced XLR analog outputs from that are going into the analog input of the PCM-1630, which has no monitoring section (the D/A card is reading off of tape, of which there is none included here or available to use for testing), and the headphone outputs are going through three adapters/cable (one channel and unbalanced) and into the service mix/monitor setup at Synhouse and you can hear that fairly well, well enough to tell it's the same program material as shown on the meters.
That demonstration is not showing the machine recording or playing back, it's just showing that it boots up, all controls are responsive, and the analog A/D card is reading the signal and the system is metering it on the LED bargraphs, and you can see it has the peak marker mode being turned on and off (this shows the most recent peak as one LED floating above the rest, while the rest are VU averaging). This doesn't prove it is fully working on the whole A/D and D/A throughput or show any actual recording audio testing being done, just that it powers up, and more than powers up, it can change modes A/B, etc., so it has all these functions going.
10 июн 2024
