I managed to find an HS-PC202, untested, for a nice 51 Euro. It had the plastic AAA battery compartment, which was what attracted me to it. I have a pretty much mint HS-PX101, but it was missing that very essential part. I had to do a fair share of work on it to get it working, but its sound quality has justified all of it. Firstly, I had to clean up after the previous person who visited under the back cover. There was a mysterious jumper wire shorting the ground of the headphone jack to one leg of a capacitor, I removed it. Next, I looked over the capacitors and found that all 220uF ones had leaked. Curiously, only those ones, but since there are less than a dozen caps to replace in this model, I had replaced all of them. Usually I replace small electrolytics with ceramic/tantalum SMD caps if possible, to avoid problems with lack of space. But this model had through-hole caps which made that impossible. My solution was very simple: I had a working Sony WM-B47 Walkman laying around in atrocious cosmetic condition, so I snagged all te capacitors I needed from it. Replacing 30 year old capacitors with 30 year old capacitors - great idea, but if they lasted this long I bet they have at least 10 more years left in them. I've never had a Sony with bad caps, even a 1979 TPS-L2 I had had no problems related to them. They were a perfect fit and the Aiwa fired up, sounding very nicely and loudly, with no screeching on Dolby B/C. Lastly, I cleaned all the switches and the volume pot. Putting it together was a pain. It took me almost an hour to figure out why the motor governor circuit would short positive (B+) to ground when reinstalling the PCB. Whichever genius was tinkering with it before wedged the B+ cable to the motor so hard between the case and mechanism that the insulation on it got torn, and it was shorting to ground (mechanism). Having fixed that, the Aiwa started working properly, finally! It's a really neat unit this one, clear and wide sound and a very powerful Dolby B and C circuit. The original belt is still going strong, wow and flutter is impressively low. Take that Sony, with your melting goo belts!
I have one of these and I love it - nice sometimes to sidestep Sony eh! Amazing the belts on Aiwas ..
