It was certainly worth changing the pinch rollers. The left one, which was causing poor playback on side A, had a big dent in it. Someone had clearly switched it off when it had been playing a tape, and left it like that for a long time. The capstan had therefore dented the pinch roller.
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To be honest we don’t recommend using DCC players for analogue playback anyway as the claimed durability of the head is about half and they added a protection layer just to protect against the abrasiveness of analogue tapes.
By the way, as your offerings also include repair of damaged tapes, did you come across a DCC with dropouts or anything that could need additional error correction? I would love to read your opinion here: https://forum.dccmuseum.com/t/is-there-any-need-for-additional-error-correction/
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The DCC900 repair video will be released later today on this link:
Just love the last three letters of that random link URL!
Of course you are very much promoted in the video (and any back link would be appreciated too).
For your info: I was barking up the wrong tree with the lack of analogue playback.
I looked for and found a failed through-hole on the Digital PCB. You had told me to look at the read/write PCB. So, strangely, it would seem that both PCBs had the same problem on the same signals! However I’ve decided not to dismantle it and work on the read/write PCB at this time. It’s just that there’s always a risk with working on that PCB in particular, and since analogue playback will never be used, I’ve decided to leave that problem unless I have to work on the PCB again in the future.
There is still the DCC300 with no digital playback, but analogue works. But it’s lacking treble, so I wonder if there’s a clue. It doesn’t have the “slushy” sound of bad head azimuth though. What happens when the heads wear on DCC? I also need to find the test mode operation for the DCC300.
All for another day though, I have a bit of a backlog of other projects.
All the best,
Colin
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Great detailed video.
Thanks for sharing.
The reason why the right pinch roller did not come out is that you would have to open the mechanism tray slightly. You can do that manually by turning the wheel on the right.
Ralf
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I’ll add that to the video comments.