Hello from Roma, Italy

greetings!
my name is Sandro, i live in Roma, Italy. i'm glad to find this community here!
i'm back to tapes and i could say without exaggeration that my old Walkman (WM-B52) used to save my life as a student, an adolescent, a misunderstood young punk, whatever... more than 35 years ago. after the Uni i worked in several music studios and nowadays i'm a sound recordist in the audio-visual industry so yes i belong to the generation who saw all of it coming, from analog to digital... and back. i'm back to tapes mostly out of nostalgia, for i used the corpse of my glorious first double-deck (Super Tandem D8334) to hide that dreadful internet box, and guessed how it would feel to have a working one. it felt good so it became my first tape-related project: a brand-new-looking unit i'm still struggling with about those plastic wheels, mostly because i'm pretty much unexperienced at repairing such things of course. you people know what i'm talking about.
another project was to be back on recording tapes, lucky me got a beautiful DX-59 for very cheap, my tapes sounding like never before so i definitely needed a Walkman. started buying cheap machines with a fancy look and crashed into the infamous RQ-SXxx series. some advice from youtube, some threads around here, the beautiful walkman.land archive, a lot of trial-and-error courage & desperation + quite some sleepless nights, and i (think i) learned to completely dismantle the AR-10 rascal. managed to put 4 (so far) of those machines back together, up and running: a 25 (made me cry), 32 (searched the little spring for 40 minutes), 52 (6X disassembled), 53 (opened and "serviced" by a much more dangerous and unexperienced beast before i did).
open without breaking things, take pictures, disassemble, clean thoroughly, find mistakes/missing pieces/defective parts (it took 3 of the SX25 to make one - hopefully, so far - working), buy replacements, glue, bend (straighten), put things together, test, repeat until success - or fatal failure. all in a word? BIG FUN.
along the process all the fun became somehow also a bit of political, by reflecting about the way people experience music today, the attention span - time - capitalism dilemma, spotify &C, blah blah you beautiful people already know all of it. going back to tapes seems to be a nice, cool, organic, beautiful way to spread the word about all of this. add the nostalgia, here i am. some e-mails and calls with a beautiful human (also Italian, and already a member) helped putting me on the right track, build on the passion, and focus on priorities: got me a Weller soldering station, some precision tools and OF COURSE i wanted my big yellow boy back from the dead. got a WM-B52 (and a WM-B53 and a WM-BF59, but that's another story) and surprise! sounds like heaven! true what the doctor says, machines from the eighties sound much better, are more stable and more fun to fix - maybe? let's find out i say, hopefully with some help from this flourishing, beautiful community!
i'd write a lot more about my stuff and ideas, and of course i have a million questions for the wise and the experienced, but maybe this can be enough for a formal presentation.
a quick note about some future projects: i'm about to bite my teeth into a bunch of RQ-Xxx (AR-20) - hoping to make at least some of them work, got a DD11 to repair (will post soon for advice... please!) + more on the way.

thanks for reading me through all of this! hope it makes sense! let's talk soon!

CHEERS

Sandro

 

Billy Squire into a floppy, man!
the best science fiction comes from the past nowadays, not from the future! thanks for the share Sir, my pleasure!