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Often its from a bad power supply or digital device. You can try turning off every electronic device and see it if goes away. I had a router power pack causing it on AM here. It was a bad capacitor inside putting rubbish back out into the mains wiring.

I think I only used it on the one input and that was a while ago, but the fader seemed to do something with the effects. From memory there is a manual available online, possibly from the companies website, which may help if there is any need to set the source switch or something to get the fader to work.

Hitachi liked to do things a bit differently. Their 70s portable TVs with the tuners on top are another one of their oddball layouts, but would be handy in certain situations.

First the door has to close fully and press a switch on the tray. You could have a slipping belt but usually it results in the tray coming back out or something like that. The laser then needs to center and press a switch. If its already in the center they sometimes move out and back in to check. Then the laser should light and the lens start hunting up and down to find focus. Once that happens if there is a disc there, it will try to spin it up and read some data. It sounds like you have a mechanical issue if its intermittent but then reads a whole disc, but it could be one of the electronic adjustments is right on the edge of allowing it to read a disc.

@@StevesElectronicRepairShop Thanks so much for the reply and explanation. I'll have a bit more of a fiddle and try and give it a tweak. 👍

Wagner Electronics in Australia still sell lamps of the right size and voltage, or they can be found on Ebay with some difficulty

@ thanks for your reply! I’m in Europe and if you remember the size and voltage, that would be great for searching Mouser.

I worked on some from that era about 20 years ago but cant remember much about them. There were a few makes and models that used a service remote but the service agent had one so I never had a reason to try and find any way around it.

I dont have any facilities to do a dump and wouldnt like to mess with it anyway.

​@@StevesElectronicRepairShopIt's not what I expected to hear 😞 , but it's completely respectful.

Yes those lamps were good at doing things like that unless mounted facing downwards on the side of your house. I just pulled a professional one apart and they certainly have much bigger triacs along with their much higher price. The triacs in household dimmers liked to short even without a faulty light globe at the time, but the way many lamps failed probably stressed them over time. At least they didnt go open circuit and stop the light from working.

@@StevesElectronicRepairShop Yes, the professional light chasers, controllers and dimmers have really nice high current triacs in them. A friend who works at an electronics recycling centre must have scrapped something like this recently as he handed me a bag of parts last week containing two dozen BTA40-600B triacs. They're good for 40 amps at 600 volts. I should build something with them.

Unfortuntately these top of the line things end up getting old and passed down to people that dont care much for them. They are solid enough to keep going despite the abuse unlike the cheaper units.

@StevesElectronicRepairShop true that I hate what people do to those poor stereos

Pretty sure the first pair I purchased in the late 80s were Crescent. They made reasonable screwdrivers too. I havent seen the Channelock for sale anywhere locally, but its been a long time since I have visited an electrical wholesaler.

I dont think I tried the phono on this amp. I do need to give it a test run so have dug it out and will let you know what I find

I dont think I did anything with the pinch rollers in this video so no I am not sure, but the whole assembly usually unclips and then the pinch roller pin is also clipped in to the holder with these later model plastic decks. If there is a manual online the exploded view should show you.

Glad it helped keep another vintage deck running. I always looked for ways to keep the cost of repairs down and fix things that were 'written off', so learned a few tricks like fixing these modules over the years.

Its amazing where things end up. People moving to other countries take all sorts of things with them. I purchased a couple of 110v NTSC Magnavox TVs off a guy here that he brought with him from the US back when a multistandard TV was very expensive to buy here. Me and a mate used them to watch satellite TV in the NTSC standard.

Belt kits are available from Wagner Electronics in Australia. If the rotary drum is scratchy sounding the coils may have just come loose and can be glued back in place. I have used cotton buds for years. As long as you dont use ones with loose cotton that can catch on the head, they do the job fine. Have used the chamois cleaners but they just cost a lot more to do the same job and you have to remember to order them so you dont run out. Cotton buds are available at the supermarket. I have a pile of BASF tapes I have been transferring old adverts off to put on TH-cam, and none have played up so far, other than the one in the video had some damage at the start so ended up as a test tape. The climate here is kind to tapes though. Maybe heat and humidity damage them.

I agree with mmmm1 - '90s BASF videotapes, especially the E-300 "chrome quality" series are absolute garbage and should not be used. Speaking from experience, I used to own a few E-300's way back in 1993 as "test tapes" and I will simply say VCR repairs after using those tapes in them proved to be a tad expensive. Those tapes actually damaged VCR's. Funnily enough I never had any dramas with E-180 standard tapes.

@@RoughJustice2k18 E300 can be problematic from any brand, the tape is too thin and not every VCR can handle it. 1993 I think was still the blueish gray case era for BASF, those tapes are less problematic, the real problem started around 1995 with the red, colorful cases. Especially their 'master' whatever series is bad, which advertises itself as backcoated. The backcoating is supposed to prevent the tape sticking to itself on the reels, but after ~15 years, it starts to do the opposite, and it can even flake off of the tape surface, sticking to the magnetic layer of the adjacent turn of tape, causing horrible head clogs and possibly head damage (the drum sometimes wraps a meter of tape around itself). I have a 1999 BASF/EMTEC and that also wrapped itself around the drum when I tried to play it after 24 years. I had to wind it all the way through in a VCR that doesn't lace up the tape onto the drum during FF/REW, after that it was playable. Don't use any Chrome tapes for testing the record function, because their magnetic layer is deteriorating, I noticed this with chrome audio tapes, after about 20-30 years, depending on storage conditions, the chromedioxide particles go through something that weirdly enough, causes them to gradually loose recording sensitivity, you have to decrease the bias a lot to get somewhat normal high frequency response, the tape saturates at lower and lower levels, you get lot lower playback levels compared to the recording level, eventually it reaches a point that the recording will be distorted regardless of the level, if you record it at -6dB it will play back at -20dB and super distorted. The weirdest and most fortunate thing about this is that it doesn't affect the existing, old recording on the tape, it might lose 1-2dB of level, but evenly across the whole frequency range, and even the noise floor drops by the same amount, so it only causes issues if the tape was recorded with Dolby, because the Dolby calibration will be off. I want to test that with video tapes, I have some 40 years old chrome VHS and even older video2000 tapes, I wonder what happens if I try to record on them - but first, I have to digitize their current content.

@@StevesElectronicRepairShop Thanks, I wonder if they bother to ship to Europe... the supply has pretty much dried up here, there's a supplier in the UK (Donberg Electronics), but they are quite expensive and also out of stock from most VCR parts. Here in Hungary our biggest supplier just dumped their VCR parts, including head drums and everything as e-waste... They were selling them discounted for a few years, but after experiencing minimal interest from customers, they just ditched the remaining stock. I was late, I was able to buy a few things, but missed a lot more, for example they ditched their stock of about 5 remaining head discs for the Fisher VBS-7000 / Sanyo VTC-9300 Betamax, which I have two machines of... They could have sold these parts on ebay for big money, but they just tossed everything... I was fuming, especially after they denied selling me parts that they still had, they just removed them from their website after preparing to send them to an e-waste facility. I know this because they forgot to delete some parts from the website and I bought them, and an employee said they had to dig them out from a huge pile of misc. discarded parts in their warehouse. After that I told their manager I would buy a good portion of those parts, but he denied. Here I can't find cotton buds that won't catch on the corner of the head, although I haven't tried many brands because I considered this method too risky, especially since I was taught in school to only use paper or chamois on video heads. I clean the tape path and lower drum with cotton buds, sometimes also the upper drum, while being very careful not to touch the head cores with them. In regards the rotary transformers, I know it can be glued back, but I also know the original glue is corrosive, the coils are sometimes open before they become loose. I want to use epoxy so it surely never becomes loose again and won't corrode the coils, but future coil repairs after that will probably be impossible, so I don't want to glue back corroded coils that can fail at any time, that's why I want to make new coils even if the originals are not open yet.

@@mrnmrn1 That makes sense with the coils. Cleaning the old glue off is another option I guess, but not that easy with the fragile coils. Not sure if Wagner send overseas. Best to email them. Shame that supplier scrapped all those parts, but they were likely taking up more real estate than they pay for these days. I was surprised that Wagner still stock some of this stuff, but maybe its easier for them to just wait for it to sell out rather than having to clean it all out. They must have purchased in bulk to still have parts available that likely havent been made for close to 20 years now.

There is not much besides the motor or a lubrication issue could cause that. If you need a motor let me know. I ended up turning mine into a tuner only, and the turntable is going in the scrap metal.

It shouldnt matter. The region information is processed on the main board that decodes the information off the disc.

@StevesElectronicRepairShop I thought the region is in the board code and not in the components, like the dvd tray (the complete drive deck).

If I didnt mention the length in the video you will have to measure your old one. Belts can be purchased from Wagner Electronics.