Hello, as some of you might know now, I bought a Sony M-1PD recently and fixed it. At least I thought I did.. I tried to record on a chrome microcassette I've made and unfortunately, it sounded dreadful. The music is "blown away", I really don't know have words to describe it. Most of the time it just sounds very muted and muffled, only rarely it sounds okay. I can provide an mp3 of what the recording sounds like. I recorded it off the microphone input connected to my laptop, but it's definitely not caused by the input being too hot, I checked. What could be causing this?
I don't have one of those yet so I don't know all of the features but I'm assuming you don't have another microcassette to compare. Is there a built in mic to see if your getting good dictation recordings, I have a Sony M-7 but it's just mono so I'm looking at that and some old photos on the forum, all of my stereo players have a built in mic. There's a lot of things that can go wrong without it being a serious problem but if your getting a good sound once in a while I'd start out simple. Look in the headphone jack and see if there's corrosion or rust Clean the heads and rollers Try another tape, the stereo models were made for Metal Tapes, fairly rare in microcassette. If you don't have one, take an old dictation cassette and metal full size cassette tape and replace the tape with the metal. I haven't done this yet so I can't help you but it looks super easy. Check the felt pads in the cassette, they are usually on both sides of the play head. If they've disintegrated your tape will not have enough pressure on the head, they are very small and just tall enough to hold the tape at the level of the bottom edge. There's more things but these were built like a tank so I like to start with these wear parts first.
Those two are not the cause for sure. The felt pads are fine and as you've said, I did make my own "metal" microcassette, but used chrome tape instead. This model does not have a built-in mic. But the mic jack should be fine, because recordings made on regular dictation tapes sound fine, although, there is really a lot of hiss that is not there because of the tape, it's audible only when loud music is playing. So, these artifacts are only present when recording on my custom made tape. Could the chrome tape be the issue? I don't see why would it, since it's the same bias as a metal tape. The tape head looks suspicious. I cleaned it with IPA but it has some spots on it that frankly look like damage to the head to me, because they don't look flat, more like indents. Excuse the poor photo quality but I don't have a better camera.
I found this thread on Steve Hoffman's Forum, lot's of good ideas. I posted a website on this forum that has .wav test tones, you could make your own tape and at least get an idea if it's working although it won't be as accurate as a branded test tape.
Sorry for the late reply, but I fixed it. As you said, the microphone jack needed cleaning. I also wiped the head with IPA and now it works fine.
That's good to hear. Unfortunately my link is gone, I'll try to find it, there' was a great check list for finding the problem for more complicated problems.
