ARCHIVED FORUM -- March 2012 to February 2022READ ONLY FORUM
This is the second Archived Forum which was active between 1st March 2012 and 23rd February 2022
Hello All -
I am currently fixing up a very very clean Beosystem 3300; the BeoMaster, Gram, and Gram CD are near-mint and running flawlessly with the new rubber parts that I purchased from beoparts.com (thanks much!).
The fly in the ointment, so to speak, is that the BeoCord, while mechanically flawless, is only playing / recording on one side.
It sounds great on the one side; when I flip the balance all the way over to the other side, though, the signal is extremely weak. It doesn't sound distorted or muffled as far as I can tell, it's just very very quiet.
Tried to record with the deck, played it back in my Nakamichi - same problem.
Probing with a pointy metal instrument, I can get the "POP!" from both sides of the head connections. And tracing the signal further into the path.... same thing.
The BeoMaster has been fully cleaned and is playing beautifully on both channels, btw, so it's not there.
What is going on here? Where should I look next? Could the head be toast? Can replacement heads be had?
Here's hoping someone with a bit of experience can shed light on my situation. This set is so so so beautiful and I'm eager to have it running perfectly- it even came with the wall bracket!
Thanks so much.
A quick update -
I disconnected the heads' connection to the mainboard, and measured the resistance of the head coils;
The working side reads 256 ohms, which seems perfectly normal.
The non working side is open.
So it seems that I somehow have a defective tape head in this thing. How is that even possible? This thing literally sat in the box for the last 20 or so years and is otherwise in perfect condition.... Very strange. But the numbers don't lie.
Does anyone know where I might be able to purchase a functional mechanism / tape head? Should I just wait for a decent parts unit on that auction site?
Hey, thanks for the help, guys!
For posterity - the fix was indeed to rip a head from a parts unit and replace the bad one.
Never in my life have I seen a dead channel in an otherwise mint cassette recorder!
But - all's well that ends well. The Beosystem made it to the collector in great shape. A massive success all around.