I have an old Aiwa HP-S 107 bought in 1990 and yesterday I tried to turn it on; as soon as the audio amplifier is powered, on the output I get a resonance tone, roughly around 1KHz. I do not get any sound from the head, only this ear-killing tone which can be heard even when REW or FF. I've read of the AIWA bad capacitors issue, but the problem I have is not listed as a typical symptom. It's a cheap walkman, I paid it the equivalent of today's 40 euro and I do not think it's worth fixing, but I'm just wondering if it's only a matter or bad capacitors or there is something else really gone bad.

The walkman is in perfect cosmetic condition complete with its original yellow box and arc headphone and was still working when I upgraded to a better model in 1994; I think I'll just keep it as an ornament

thanks

bye

The symptoms seem to point to a capacitor issue. The reason why it is still heard when REW or FF is activated? Well in some units there are no muting transistors so the amplifier is active when the motor is active too.

Probably not worth fixing, unless of course you want to learn/practise re capping your own walkmans with it.

The tape transport is manually activated and I think there is just one switch which powers both motor and amplification circuitry. If I could easily find new capacitor I might think of replacing them, but low voltage electrolytic caps are hard to find: there is an on-line sellers with similar capacitors in stock, but they are sold in batch of 100 units. Very likely 3~5 different sizes are required and hence the total cost would be pretty high.

thanks

cheers

Where are you based?

I'm in Italy and the on-line sellers I was referring to RS: they have almost everything, but they serve professionals who buy large quantity.

cheers

You might want to try any of the following instead who would deal in lower volumes. Careful, some do charge more for postage.

www.digikey.com (they have Italian site too, but not all things are added to its catalogue www.digikey.it)

it.mouser.com

it.farnell.com

Thanks for the Info !

I do not think I will try to fix the Aiwa (way too many plastic parts, it looks like if I fully  disassemble it, it will never return in one piece again ), but I have another SONY microcassette corder from the late '80s which is very likely suffering from bad capacitors too (its symptom is low output from the head, I need to raise the volume to max to hear something, but then static noises are rather high). 

  The PCB is really tiny and there is a lot of wirings (they did not use flat cables and/or sockets back then), but the unit is powered by two size AA batteries thus raising capacitors max voltage spec to 6.3V; luckily those caps are a bit easier to find and i might consider fixing this unit.

thanks

bye