I know enough to play with stuff until it’s beyond me.
In a nutshell: When I place an actual DCC into the machine it accepts the cassette, and then spends forever fast-forwarding through the cassette. It’s like it’s trying to find a track to start.
Things I know: It originally struggled to open and gave me ‘No Cassette’ notfications. It doesn’t do it anymore.
After a bit of TLC, the tray now opens and its operation is very smooth.
I changed the tray belt to be sure. And this continues to work. Making no difference to the fastforwading issue.
Old music cassettes work perfectly and the quality of the playback is excelent.
I am at a loss of what else to do?
It could be the fact that I am using just one DCC to test the machine? Could it be the cassette that’s at fault, and not the machine?
Are there different ‘digital’ heads that I need to clean? If so, where are they?
Second-generation machines will keep fast-forwarding when they (think they) have a prerecorded cassette but there’s no Table of Contents on the tape.
Prerecorded tapes only have one hole on the bottom side to let the recorder know it’s a DCC (not an analog cassette). User-recordable tapes have more holes which indicate the length of the tape. If the switches in the recorder don’t detect the other holes, the recorder thinks it’s a prerecorded tape and will try to find the table of content (which isn’t there of course). This is only a problem in 2nd generation recorders: DCC300, DCC380, DCC600, DCC450, FW91 etc.
If the problem happens with a prerecorded tape, try cleaning the head.
If the problem happens with a user recordable tape, switch the recorder to service mode and test the switches inside the cassette compartment. The switches that don’t work probably need to be cleaned.
Instructions to switch to service mode are in the service manual. If you don’t feel comfortable doing this, the DCC museum can help.