the variety of cassette tapes you can find is amazing everything from music to listen
to while you're smoking your parliament lights to music to help you stop smoking
when i got my new teac 1200 cassette deck and started testing it i noticed that the
left side deck had less wow and flutter than the right side deck both were better than
teac's official specification for it so i can't complain but i wanted to find out what was the
cause of the difference between the two decks so i opened it up and i swapped the belts between
the left and right side decks and now the right side deck is the one with less wow and flutter
so clearly the belts play an important role in the performance of this deck
so that got me thinking about the possibility of an easy upgrade for this would be to
install better quality and more consistently manufactured belts than what it comes with
so i took off the original belts and i measured them
as accurately as i could and i ordered what i think are the correct sizes for it these are
evg belts you can find them from various suppliers online i got them from marvac
electronics which has their own website marvac.com or you can order from them on ebay
so here are the two sizes i ordered which hopefully are correct scx 5.1 and scy 4.2
this one is a 5.1 inch by .048 inch square belt and this one is a 4.2 inch by .034
inch square belt i got two sets of them to do both decks and they're only a couple dollars each so
this whole set of belts here cost me less than twenty dollars including shipping
so i'm first going to test the belts it came with
then i'll install these new belts and i'll see if it makes any improvement in wow and flutter
this is the left side deck with the belts that are originally on the right side deck
which are the ones that are not as good so you can see it's measuring around .16 to 0.17 wrms
and here's the right side deck with the belts that used to be
in the left side deck and you can see it's doing much better at around 0.10 percent
wrms so i would want both of the decks to be this good if i can so that's why i'm going to try
replacing the belts with those new ones and see if i can get both of them to be as good as this
replacing the belts in this deck is super easy there's only two belts
there's the main one going from the flywheel to the motor and you notice the spindle on the
motor has two grooves on it the belt goes on the one that's closer to the rear of the deck
it's a lot easier to replace if you unscrew the mounting bracket for the motor although on
this side you probably can get away with doing it with just a hook tool to hook it onto the spindle
but on the other side the clearance is not as good so you probably will need to remove the motor
then once you get this belt off you can get access to the other belt
which goes from this groove on the inner side of the flywheel to this spindle up here
now i think mostly this main belt is what's responsible for the wiring flutter
because it directly drives the capstan which is what actually moves the tape
along this one just drives to take up reel which is not quite as important but
just for the sake of completeness i'll replace both of these belts
here are the original belts i took off these are the better ones in terms of wow and flutter
and here are the new belts i'll be installing to replace them i compared them the new ones are just
a little bit smaller in diameter than the original ones but of course they're going
to get stretched out because these are brand new never been used so hopefully
these are the correct sizes and they'll just stretch out a little bit once they get used
now you don't have to worry about whether or not you get them perfectly straight on the
pulleys because they're square belts so they'll tend to straighten themselves out as it spins
so before i go changing the ones on the other side i'm gonna test these
and see what difference it makes
well here are the new belts installed and actually got worse
it's actually even a little bit worse than the worst of the two
sets of original belts but i'm going to try swapping the smaller of the two belts
so i swapped the smaller of the two belts back to the original one while the main belt going from
the motor to the flywheel is the new one and that made a surprising improvement it's almost as good
as the original belts were now it could be that the new belts i ordered are simply a
little bit too small because i wasn't exactly sure when i was measuring them
how much you're supposed to stretch them out so i'm going to try ordering the next size
larger of these belts and see if that's a better match for the original belts
"the belt is one whole shy of perfection" ... "ridiculous!"
in the meantime here are two tapes i already recorded on this deck
this first one is on tdk sa-90 tape and this is a really excellent tape
sounds excellent it was able to handle peaks up to 6 db on the meter with no appreciable distortion
so this deck really does well with tdk sa type 2 high bias tape but surprisingly also
a very good performer is this radio shack hd tape which i believe is a rebadged maxell
ud ii tape also type 2 high bias this one also did very good on this deck and yes as you can tell
i'm a big fan of using my brother p-touch to do these labels i got quite carried away on this one
so here's the rundown of all of these main capstan drive belts i tested all of them on the right side
deck and in conjunction with the original teac smaller belt so that's not a factor in this
the original teac belt that was originally on the left side deck
turned out to be the best one in terms of wow and flutter these wow and flutter measurements are
all in wrms and the original stock teac belt that was in the left side deck
turned out to be the best at around .08 to .10 percent
the next was this prb belt distributed by evg in their scx 5.1 size it measured around 0.12 to 0.14
percent and then was the right side original teac belt it measured around point .14 to .16 percent
and the worst was the other new prb belt and measured around .15 to .17 percent
so you can see there's quite a variation here even between the two original teac belts
and one the new prb belts was pretty much right in the middle between them so i think
all these are probably from the same manufacturer and they just don't have very good quality control
that's why they're such a large variation and why some people they get a deck with one of these good
belts in it and they think it's perfectly fine and some people are unlucky they get one of these
decks and it has one of these inferior belts in it and they have noticeable wow and flutter
so this definitely demonstrates that there's quite a bit of room for improvement
and the belts that are used in these decks if they could somehow improve their quality control
and all get them as good as this one it could make a measurable and audible improvement in
the performance of these decks but as things stand right now if you're unlucky and your deck
comes with a not so good belt in it replacing it with an aftermarket one may or may not improve the
performance it could make it better or could actually make it worse so i guess you have to
do what i did and buy two of them and hopefully one of them is going to be better than the other
i'm going to do some more digging and see if i can find another supplier for these belts
which hopefully will claim to have better quality than these ubiquitous prb belts
that have pretty much cornered the market if i can find something better than these and
they're not too terribly expensive i'll give it a try and see how it turns out
now as for the smaller of the two belts used in these decks what i originally thought was the
correct size clearly was not correct because when i put this belt on it felt very tight going on
and when i tried it out it made the performance much worse than the original belt that the deck
came with so clearly these belts are too tight not the correct size
the next step up is scy 4.4 however that's a very uncommon size and some vendors even claim that
has been discontinued so i stepped up to the next size above that scy 4.6 which is
a very common size and is readily available so i think this is actually the correct size
for the smaller belt and again i bought two of them just to compare
i'm going to test these two new belts and the two original belts the deck
came with and see how they compare in terms of wow and flutter and all of them are going to
be tested with the best of the original larger size belts so this will be an equal comparison
michelle
put
your headphones on oh i'm doing my work i'm MC'ing all right listening to this
hey this is wonderful didn't she remix this for the beatles i suspect what happened was that
they recorded this on quarter track tape which had something recorded in the other direction
and when they played it back they probably sent it to the mastering lab when this record was made
and they accidentally played it on a half track tape recorder thus picking up the track going
in the opposite direction and they figured that this is the correct mix and this is what they put
on the record this mistake wasn't made on the cd this was made in the original release now if you
play it the other way around irwin it will say paul superapple is dead i buried paul superapple
so here's the verdict with the smaller belts there was still some variance in
wow and flutter between them but not nearly as much as with the main capstan drive belt
so i don't think you would notice any big difference between these
unless you have a really good ear because the range was only around 0.08 at the best
to around 0.11 at the worst and with these results being so similar i can conclusively
say that this is the correct size scy 4.6 if you need to replace one of these smaller belts
so if you have one of these decks experimenting with different belts may be an inexpensive and
relatively easy way to improve its performance there are other upgrades i have in mind for
this deck such as replacing the motors i ordered these new old stock matsushita motors from ebay
they took about two months to come in from bulgaria but they finally arrived
and i also ordered this pacific stereo motor which claims to be the highest
quality cassette deck motor available today but i'll save experimenting with these motors for
another video because it's quite a bit more advanced and it requires soldering
so i wouldn't recommend messing around with the motors for a beginner
and to be honest i don't even think this is necessary because just by experimenting
with different belts i was able to improve the performance of this deck to a level that i'm
entirely happy with it's not the best cassette deck i own
but it should be more than good enough for most people especially
as the prices of high quality vintage cassette decks continue to increase
and i'll leave you with a little bit of wfmu's incorrect music program
which i recorded back in march 1998 on this standard type one tape with no
dolby noise reduction and i'll be playing it with the teac deck's dynamic noise reduction turned on