This was an interesting one & one of the worst packing jobs I have received so far, how it got here unscathed, fuck knows!! I have never seen or heard of the TC-100 stereo sold under the ubiquitous Fidelity brand here in the UK - It's clearly a generic product with other AKA's for sure! A Facebook member sent me an image of his old & battered TC-100 recently & it looked quite appealing to me in an old 80's generic way! (As many of you know, I restore many of these often long forgotten Boomers & will continue to do so!) Less that a week later, a TC-100 pops up on eBay, very dirty but complete albeit with controls that made you jump out of your seat by just touching them Yeah they were dirty beyond words!! So yesterday it was time to restore her! This was so easy(ish) to do - Second playback deck had completely worn out belts & was the trickiest bit to do, the 'Car Mechanism' has only fast forward & eject on one push button & the quality of playback from such a unit is really not worth bothering with...........Anyway, flat flywheel drive belt & very fiddly tiny square type drive belt from under the flywheel directly to the one reel (Take Up) replaced, azimuth adjusted as it was way out & playback deck refitted! Rest was very easy, new belt on main deck, a tried & tested Orion built deck & bulletproof, leaving just the controls to clean out completely which took a good half hour to remove all static & pops/crackles successfully Next a really good clean which took a good 2 hours & what a difference it made! The good old Fidelty now is now a beautiful shiny silver & the grey rear case doesn't appear to have faded either! A very nice looking machine lacking only separate bass & terble controls now performs like when it was new, the second deck plays a little slow as these units always did due to having no servo circuit or speed control but hey, it works & I doubt got used very often as the main deck is way better & performs very well now So after becoming a little caught up in the tentyhooks doing the re-belt on the second play only deck, I can be justly proud of a great result here having never heard of or seen one of these before - I am now very well acquainted with the TC-100 Radio Recorder & I must admit I like it a lot........The sound isn't going to set any records of course but the speakers are more than adequate & deliver a good solid sound with great stabilty on the main deck & a good tuner too!! Time to sit back having caught up with the even keels, made the video's & just listen to it for the evening & watch those Led meters....... Et Viola:
The cat seems to like it. Well it isn't an Amstrad, but I doubt if there is much Fidelity in it apart from the nameplates. You may know that Fidelity were the first company in the UK to produce an Colour TV selling for under £100. The downside was that they didn't make any money on them and went bankrupt.
Thanks for sharing the home-dubbed music on that audiocassette, Mr Eccles, even as pets stalk (then settle) in the background and even after you reclined during photography in photo’22. (The audiotape is a 90-minute Fuji DR-II, yes?) The sound of that boombox, following your repair know-how, is pleasing. (Right down to the Whitesnake hit “Here I Go Again” that I had to Google to remember the band’s name LOL. Interestingly atypical, by the way, that the “car stereo”-style Tape Deck 2 has a PAUSE function, sharing the POWER switch.) No, the Fidelity brand of electronics isn’t (or wasn’t) a household name here in America; the 240 volt AC power needs, stamped on the rear data plate of your TC-100 model, make clear that the brand was meant for the UK. Member Longman states that the company was relatively pioneering in being first to offer a sub-£100 colour television set in the British Isles, though that “low pricing” strategy didn’t seem to last. (Pity about the retrenched employees.) I got my eye on you ...
