25th February, 2021
And so I unscrewed the casing off my tape deck and dived in. Be brave. Be lucky. What could possibly go wrong?
I noticed whilst listening to some Elvis Costello yesterday that it’s slowing down. Not in a ketamine type of way, but ever so slightly with a bassy vocal. The baritone vocals of yer man Elvis probably flushed out the slight error.
The trouble is, once heard, never unheard. Your ears focus in on this and you can’t appreciate the music. And so time to lift up the lid and see what I could find.
But first, a trawl through YT to help out any fudge-fingered cassette technician such as myself. I hit gold with this fella. It’s not the exact same model as mine, but pretty much the same with the inner mechanisms.
I knew that the belt doesn’t need changing. It was fitted as new before I bought it. All fingers were pointing at the power coming into the motor. My handy YT video directed me to precisely where I needed to insert my screwdriver and fumble around.
Woh - it works! A very slight turn clockwise and Elvis Costello becomes Micky Mouse. Reveres the action and Elvis swallows some horse tranquilliser.
The diagnosis was the easy part; the medication was a lot more fiddly. I needed a constant to measure the slight speed changes with. I fired up Spotify and settled down for a compare and contrast session. The margins were finite. One minor twist of my micro screwdriver put the foot on or off the cassette accelerator.
The guinea pig for this was Prince. Stick with what you know. I’m pitch perfect with the Parade vocals, even if the cassette deck isn’t. Having had Spotify in my left ear and the old analogue in my right, I never want to listen to Parade ever again. A slightly out of sync left / right channel of Kiss is quite unnerving. The original production has a deliberately delayed drum and bass.
I poked around for over half an hour before I found the sweet spot. Impressive, eh? Spotify ads didn’t exactly help with the interruptions. I now have the ears of a fine piano tuner.
The cassette deck is playing ever so slightly fast. But it’s barely noticeable. I might have to fiddle around again when I have some more time. Maybe it’s the modern interweb and Spotify that is out of breath? Will it work if I stick a screwdriver into my MacBook port?