My DCC900 was playing with dropouts to sound, especially when first switched on. Sometimes there would be no sound at all, and no readout of track titles, until it have been left playing for a while. It would then play reasonably well but not usually perfectly.
So I replaced the electrolytic capacitors on the read/write board and digital board (except the non-polarised ones which meter out perfectly). The other capacitors were all terrible and needed replacement. The boards were cleaned with IPA, including between IC legs were there was some contamination. Surface mount capacitors were used except for the four 68uF capacitors on the read/write board, after consulting the schematics I was happy to replace those with 100uF components.
The result: Exactly the same! It will play fairly well, sometimes perfectly, if left running for a while. But from cold there are still lots of dropouts. I’ve checked the VCO Free Run 7.5MHz signal on J442 of the PZ03 digital PCB, this looks correct even when the machine is dropping out. Are there some other areas that I should be checking?
Thanks for any help.
(This will eventually make it to my YouTube channel youtube.com/video99couk and of course I will link to this forum, web site and videos.)