Hi everyone ... I own a pretty decent Sony Walkman .., I just noticed that the auto reverse play mechanism is a bit off ... When playing a cassette normally on Side A, I get glorious results ... but when Side A is done and the player switches to Side B, the left channel seems to fade in and out ... I tried re-positioning the walkman ... no change ... I tried manually setting the player to reverse mode instead of letting it happen automatically and still got the same results ...
I'm pretty upset that I am just-now noticing this ... I would have returned the player a long time ago ... But I bought it brand-new ... and I guess it's only had about 50 hours of use so far ... I sonething wrong with the player ... is this typical ? ... I noticed that manually flipping the cassette over yields fine results, but it would be nice if I got those results with the mechanism I paid for ...
It sounds like an alignment issue. When the head turns to play the other side of the cassette, it is not turning exactly 180 degrees, thereby producing inferior sound. The alignment issue was a limitation of the typical auto-reverse deck design. Nakamichi refused to produce an auto-reverse deck using that technology. Instead, Nakamichi produced the uni-directional RX series of decks whereby the machine automatically flipped the cassette around. Pretty wild.
I think that a technician could at least reduce the problem. However, the cost might exceed the benefit. You could ask the technician.
Thanks Ross ... However I don't think that the head actually turns at all ... from examining the head of the Walkman compared to other heads, I noticed that the magnetic part has a mirror-image that covers the anterior section of the head face also ... so I don't think that the head itself even moves at all ... It's just that the direction of the tape changes and the 'mirror-image' part of the head reads the other half of the tape ...
... Thanks though ... I'll ask a the tech about it when I take my deck in ...
Interesting. If that's the case, perhaps the head element that reads the reverse direction tape is defective. One other thought: I wonder if there is a tape speed problem when in reverse mode.