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A while back, I picked up a pair of Akai SW-125's on a whim. They're cute little mid-sized 3-ways, similar enough to Sansui and Pioneer speakers from the era. They sound quite pleasant, with a warm but crisp midrange and surprisingly good bass for a Japanese speaker of this era. Quite efficient...

I picked up a clean-looking TEAC A4010S a while ago, and it sprang to life with a new belt, pinch roller, and some lubrication. However, the reel spindles wobble noticeably, which is causing issues with tape winding and alignment. I suspected the reel tables at first, but looking down at them...

Picked up a minty Hamlin's 20/20 amp (and matching HS-2 AM/FM stereo tuner) for a song a while back. Hamlin's was a Seattle-based hifi shop in the early 60's that rebranded Japanese audio components as their house-brand (these being a Trio/Kenwood W45 amp and AF270 tuner, respectively). Funky...

The UDAR belt on my Nak finally bit the dust. Tearing into it, I was dismayed to find that the pulley belts are on separate pieces (the motor on the top piece, the gear pulley on the bottom piece), making it impossible to replace the belt. How the heck does anyone replace that stupid thing??

I had an SX3700 a few years ago, and strongly regret getting rid of it after the tuner stopped working. Well, it seems Santa heard my wishes, and now I have a rather rough-looking SX3700 on my desk. Thankfully, most of the issues seemed to be costmetic-missing switch tabs, a missing speaker...

Hey all, Recently lucked into a pair of Pioneer CS63DX’s for a price I couldn’t say no to. Unfortunately, while one speaker sounded great, the other speaker had a dead supertweeter horn (PT-103F), and sounded muddy and dreadful as a result. I did what any self-respecting AKer would do, and quit...

Moving cross country soon, and have a few Q's about shipping my record collection and my receivers. Don't really have enough to justify a shipping truck, and like hell am I driving a Uhaul across country, so I'm opting to ship the most essential stuff to my new apartment. 1) Do boxes of records...

Howdy y'all! I'm looking at a cross-country (DC to Seattle) move for work in the next month or so, and I am wondering how exactly I should pack up my system so that it arrives there in one piece. This consists of a receiver, two turntables, a cassette deck, a graphic equalizer, and two pairs of...

A good friend of mine hit me up this weekend, asking if I had any recommendations for an affordable turntable that can play 78's, as he'd just inherited a large box of them alongside a large floorstanding Victrola. Knowing his budget and his very particular sense of aesthetics, I was torn...

I have a Pioneer PL-L1000 whose arm lifter motor stopped functioning a while ago. Replacing the belts, and the capacitors and diodes on the board, has brought me no luck, so I decided to measure the voltage across the terminals-barely nothin’. Then I carefully desoldered the motor and strapped...

Not sure if I've asked this before, but on my Sansui 5500, I've noticed that the bass knob basically has little audible effect until it's turned to +/-4. I can verify with a signal gen and meter that it has some effect between -3 to +3 (mostly at the very lowest frequencies), but the difference...

I might be picking up a Technics SL-1800 soon, and was curious as to what the general pecking order was for Technics. I know the SP-10 is revered, the SL1200 mk 2 is the classic DJ turntable, and I had an SL23 for a bit that was pretty nice, but I haven’t found a good comprehensive overview of...

Well, in a bit of good news, I will be moving across the country come May! I’ve grown tired of my life here in DC, and I figure that the west coast will be a nice change of pace and have better career opportunities for me. I’m very excited to start a finally new life for myself once this damn...

I've noticed that the wow and flutter on my TEAC A6300 is almost unusably high at 3.75ips-much worse than even the crappiest cassette decks I've owned. Recording anything with piano or sustained vocals sounds like garbage. It seems pretty consistent across the tape, but I don't have the guts to...

On my Sansui 5500, I can hear the audio output from my MacBook Pro (which I use a digital media streamer into the aux input) faintly on all inputs, even with the volume down at 0. Phono 1, Phono 2, all the tape/NR/source/adaptor switches, and even on the FM and AM tuners. It’s very faint, but...

Saw this battered old Harman Kardon 730 twin-powered on the fleabay this week, and after much deliberation, I decided to spring for it. I didn't really need it, but it's too gorgeous of a piece to let it get snatched up by some scrapper, so I'm gonna give it my best! Looks like it's in...

Snagged myself a TEAC A6300 a couple weeks ago, and lemme say, this thing is awesome! For the longest time, I had an Akai 4000DS Mk II that I rescued from a studio in DC. Got it working, but I never could get it to record properly (could never get the volume balanced during record or playback)...

Well, I’m sure we’ve all done it. We get something neat, we sell it for something else, we miss it dearly, and months or years later, we let our id get ahold of us and we take an ill-advised gamble to get another. Tale as old as this website, right? Well, as you can tell, I missed my Dual 1019...

Picked up a very mint-looking TEAC A6010 reel to reel today off the 'bay. Came with a whole bucket of extra goodies (tapes, demagnetizer, splicer, cords, microphones, even a bottle of cleaning fluid). In the owners manual, I found a magazine page from November 1982 with instructions on demagging...

I hear about it all the time-"oh this cart is a horrible match for that arm", with general descriptions about muddy bass or hum or horrible resonance, and headspinning compliance equations. All these absolutely wild things that can supposedly happen if you put the wrong cartridge on the wrong...

I'm sure this is probably a realllllly dumb question, but here goes: I've got a big box of 45's dating from the late '40s through the late '90s that I haven't really touched in a long time because I'm not much of a singles guy, but I reckon it'd be nice to spin them every now and then. I was...

I just received a Nakamichi RX-202 off the ‘bay. It was sold as “for parts”, as the play function was not working, but FF/RW/eject/reverse worked. It was $99, so I took the gamble and bought an idler and a brick of TDK’s. It arrived in...well, the packaging job was hilariously poor-a cut down TV...

Decided that I’m over cheap thrift store cassette decks, and that I want to step up to something nicer in 2020. Currently, I’ve got a cheap dual-well Denon that gets the job done and makes nice recordings, but the w/f is a bit high for my taste, and I’ve got a Pioneer CTF-750 that is...

So I bought a Sansui AU-555 for a small desktop system. It’s probably too nice for that purpose, but it was a moment of weakness and I fell in love with the looks, and the size of it seemed to fit perfectly with what I needed. She’s apparently been completely recapped already, so it’ll be nice...

I've been looking at dipping my toes into the Sansui end of the pool lately, and have fallen in love with the 5000 series receivers (although I do like the 2000s as well). However, I'm a little put off by all these stories I've heard about the 5000's having bad driver boards that are known to...