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Hi,
I recently got hold of a Beocord 1900 in nice visual condition. It fits perfectly in my living room and my wife loves it, however there's one big snag - the playback volume is extremely low. I've cleaned the heads and transport (was pretty clean already), but to no avail.
If I have no tape playing and turn the volume of my amp all up, it's dead quiet. In other words, no noise of hum from the player. I was wondering if this could indicate that the internal amplification in the player is not working correctly?
I've tried recording tapes as well - same issue, playback volume is very low, but then the bass gets distorted as well.
Where should I begin to look? I'm handy with a soldering iron and can use a multimeter and scope, but far from a trained technician.
Jacques
Thanks! :)
I've made a DIN->RCA adapter that I use which seems to work fine. The low volume is equally bad on both channels.
All the caps are original, so wouldn't surprise me if they were in need of replacement. However, I found it difficult to figure out where to begin with the service manual, the one I found here was a bit lacking (especially when it comes to disassembly instructions).
But I guess I could begin by probing and replacing the caps - just wanted to make sure that was the culprit before I started on such an adventure (looks like an awful lot of capacitors!). If I knew where any key components were, I could replace them first and verify things started to improve.
Do the resistors in these machines age well, or is this something I also should be wary of? Would I need to recalibrate anything after replacing the capacitors?
Are you sure, that the RCA plugs are connected correctly to their respective DIN pins?If record and playback pins get mixed up, you could end in the situation, you describe.
Capacitors could need replacing, but I suggest you diagnose and find the problem, before doing any blanket-replacing jobs.There's a huge risk of introducing more problems, that could make diagnosing the original fault more difficult.Contacts could need a good cleaning - particularly the large record/playback switch.
Keep in mind, that the record signal should be at DIN level.Not line.If you send a line signal to the Beocord, the recording will be distorted (and the record level will be next to impossible to set, as the onlyreasonable setting would be very close to zero).
Martin
This makes sense. I didn't know DIN had a different signal strength. As you said, when recording I had to use a very low record volume. I've just assumed line level was the standard.
Is there a simple way to fix this? Either by modding the DIN<->RCA adapter, or by adjusting something internally in the player?
I've tried hooking up a Beocord 4500 I had lying around, also using DIN outputs - this one was considerably louder than the Beocord 1900, so I'm again thinking that the output of my 1900 is lower than it should be?
I have an LCR meter, so I could probe around on the caps of the amplifier board to see if any are obviously bad.