I added this player to the collection and right away, I had to replace the belts. At full volume, I can just barely hear both the radio and cassette, could someone suggest what, I might be able to do? Thanks.
Lucky you! This is one of those Real Glitches that I am hoping for during my resto efforts: to stress my skills at finding the culprit! Since both channels are low this might be a coupling cap going Bad. But you need SM to find those... Does it have a line-out? That would save you some troubles at finding the glitch
No, it just has a mic input. I am thinking a faulty amp type of a thing. I don’t own special type of equipment to test anything.
all the fun parts are on the flip-side of the mainboard, but I would start by just re-flowing headphone jack: If Ground wire got loose then you will have what you got here. With a simple tester you can also check if the jack itself got broken. Also check all solder joints around the volume control: they get the most stress by decades of abuse and h/p plugging-unplugging... This is just a starting pointer: in bboxes it is the Rec/Play bar which gets Bad by NOT being used, in Walkmans it is the part which gets Overused: h/p jack. Once you eliminate these first suspects, then Bad bypass caps will give you low signal on BOTH channels. I have yet to hear about failed op-amps in battery-powered Walkmans, but who knows, maybe yours in that 0.01% category
It might be the transistors which switch the mute circuit - it’s a long shot. I’ve ordered new ones and will swap them in this week...
@Antoni , I don't know what the solution to your walkman problem is BUT this is my experience: I have experienced this issue with many walkman units. some of them have this volume pot completely dead/ dry. Someday i was cleaning the board with Isopropyl alcohol and by accident some alcohol spilled to the pot and right away it start working and the sound was clear and loud. after about 20-30 minutes sound was gone. I applied one drop of alcohol to the volume pot and it started working again!!! Then i decided to try this experiment on a different model. I had about 20-30 walkmans (Mostly Sony and Toshiba) with no sound and surprisingly all of them worked by applying one drop of alcohol. with my experiment Sony WM-2 Sony walkman-DD and Toshiba KT-AS1 and KT-AS2 are more prone to dry volume pot issue. SO it is not going to hurt your device and this is an easy way to find out whether or not the problem is your volume pot itself. Apply one drop of alcohol on volume pot and see if it works. Try this step and if it helps I might have a partial solution for you.
