I’ve had a trouble free DCC 600 for four years.
I now have a DCC 900 I’m working on. It looks incredibly nice, with no scratches anywhere. It was visibly never opened before. So it would be a shame not to be able to fix it.
I’ve just replaced all capacitors on both boards.
Prior to this, I had DCC drop-outs and no analogue replay – no sound.
Now analogue is fine but I still get the infamous 00000000F I had before in service mode, and obviously errors are still showing.
My question is: is the head toast? I’m going to replace the AWM ribbon flat cable which was almost impossible to reuse because the pins were all detached from the ribbon, on both sides.
However, I very much doubt that the ominous F comes from that.
Thanks for any hints.
By the way, the head’s flat cable is a pig to put back into place, which nobody ever talks about.
Replacing the flat cable is the right thing to do, as the pins (detached from the ribbon) can cause this problem. They do not detach without mounting them incorrectly btw. Take your time. The same for the flat cable attached to head. This can’t be replaced so take your time. A great tip from Alex Cornelissen is to mount the read-write board first and move the tray enough out of the way, so you can drop in the flat cable, attached to the head, from the top.
If all this does not resolve the errors, clean the head again. If it persists, the head could be the biggest problem.
About those flat AWM cables, both sides lost the blue sticker after the first pull out, although I was extremely careful! Probably a defective ribbon? Contacts were consequently loose too, because they were free from any adhesive.
Pushing the head flat cable from the top once the board was in place crossed my mind too.
Also… Does the F error position (last one in my case) correspond to the MRH number on the schematics? In 7, pin 20 of the TDA 1327? Just to check that the track isn’t broken.
Hi,
I got two more DCC900 machines, and it was a bit of a let down : three machines, three bad heads.
Hard luck indeed.
N°1 : 0000000F (head like new)
N°2 : FFFFFFFF (worn out head)
N°3 : FF000000 (head like new) here at least I know that my PW03 works because of the crossed tests.
Only head n°1 plays music with drop-outs. Head n°3 just spits some sounds then it wants to change sides, spits a bit more and then stops. Those two heads replay analogue tapes fine.
Obviously head n°2 does nothing.
Damn. One positive note, I can now replace heads in my sleep
Does the new cassette show the F for same tracks (1 and 2)?
Can you also check the ribbon cable that comes from the head to RW board? The odd tracks from the 3 to 21 are for playback (incl. AUX), and even (2 to 20) are for recording. You can carefully measure them either to each other or to the ground (13) in order to see if there is no breakage in the cable itself (some tracks on the cable can break at the edge of the plastic cover and copper pins).
Well, I actually have the similar story as yours - in order to repair one DC900, I bought extra 2x DCC900+1x RS-DC10 from Japan. So only one of the “newcomers” was alive showing 0 on all tracks, but that head was not recording and required the cable repair.
So I have 2x heads that shows all F and one head that has 2x F and that one produces only “splashes” of the sound…
Still wondering if that can be somehow repaired and what can damage the heads so much if they all look clean and without abrasion. If the heads are so much tender the usage of DCC is a lottery.
Will be nice to play the tape you recorded on #3 on the head that at least has only one F and see how the recording was done.
Ta Sergey,
The thee heads had never been disconnected before me. I checked PW03 and the problem is indeed on the heads.
I will have a closer look at that. Will re-measure the heads that are cut.
A fourth head arrived in my letter box this morning!
Are you changing the head itself in the whole mechanism?
Why just not to replace the RW board between the “trays”?
In order not to deal much with the azimuth settings and etc…
Anyhow will be nice to measure the resistance between the tracks to be sure that the cable is OK.
On mine units 2 cables required repair but only 1x head is working at the end.
Very much frustrated in fact.
If I would know that it is such a lottery, just sold out the very first one broken.
But I was lucky to sell the most expensive and finally working RS-DC10 for a good price and 1x non-working DC900 cheaper than I got it.
At the end I got back all the spendings, but still thinking what to do with the last 2x DC900 if there is a way to get the head alive.
I change the head only.
Head n°4 plays fine but no track number or time.
I knew that, I got the head knowing that one head was shot.
This just confirms that only the head poses a problem. Recap job and ribbon are therefore fine.
The DCC900 has played all afternoon without a glitch. Sometimes track number appears but that’s the head’s doing. It was discarded by the friend who gave it to me for this reason. He ended up buying a head from Ralf, at great cost of course.
well, each head requires the RDMUX some tuning on the RW board.
Around 350mV +/- ~30 on the RW side.
Do you have the 00 for AUX for the head to read the time and track number?
And if you change only the head this required some azimuth tuning in order not to make a crease on the tape… that also a tricky thing.
I’ve asked to check the recording on the brand new tape considering the FATG of the head will not harm the tape! Please consider that recording is done with 185micron width for a single track, but reading is only 70microns!
The new head of course should work, but nobody knows for how long
Right now it works, oddly. Track number and time. I did nothing. It has played fine all afternoon, sometimes displaying track, time for a whole side and sometimes nowt.
looks good and fine. If you start to play from the middle of the song it will probably not show you the correct track number of this song, but it will read and display the next song track number.
If AUX channel is 00 it should be ok.
So new head in a new head
The most challenging is to get back to work the other heads.
