Beogram 8000: Test Drive with Miles Davis

After performing the mechanical and electronic adjustments of the Beogram 8000 that gave me some fun insight into aging transistors recently when I troubleshooted its record detection circuit, it was time to reassemble the unit and do a test drive:

I selected "Water Babies" by Miles Davis. One of my favorite records of all time. In fact I bought this one in 1979 as my 29th record (as you can see from the number label in the top left corner...;-)! This Beogram 8000 came with a decent MMC20CL cartridge and Miles sounded very smooth! It seems this Beogram is working well again. I will play it for a few more days and then it will be time to send it home to California.

Beocord 5000 (4715/4716): Fader Fixed and Putting it Back Together

I looked into the Fader of the Beocord 5000 (4715) that is (was, hopefully) on my bench. It turned out that the contacts of the Fade In and Fade Out control buttons were strongly corroded. They simply did not make contact. I pulled a strip of paper coated with DeoxIT D100 through the contact pads, while pressing the buttons, and this cleared things up. The paper had nice black streaks of them, indicating a fair amount of oxide removal. I did the same with the other buttons, giving this deck an as-new user feel. Swift response whenever a button is lightly pressed...very nice!

This encouraged me to put the deck back together. But first I needed to re-glue the veneer on one of the corners of the wood panels. I used some wood glue that I carefully inserted in between the veneer and the particle board using a thin needle. This allowed me to avoid bending the veneer to much. Here are a couple of pics of the procedure. I used snippets of transparency foils to prevent accidentally glueing on the cardboard pads that I used to protect the wood from damage by the carpenter clamps.

Once the corner was stabilized I put the wood panels back on the BC5000, and connected it to the Beomaster 6000 for a first tryout with the Beogram 4004. I taped Water Babies by Miles Davis, one of my all-time favorites of my vinyl collection. This went very well. There is almost no difference between the recording and the original. Also, the 'infamous' double capstan mechanism does not seem to have a problem...no eaten tapes so far, and the recordings seem to be very consistent. Here are a couple impressions of the kit in action:

And a somewhat shaky GIF of the entire set-up while taping (it is pretty long and a linear sweep is pretty difficult with a cell phone...;-):

Beocord 5000 (4715/4716): First Recordings!

Today I finally hooked up the still open Beocord 5000 to my Beomaster 6000 4-Channel for some basic testing. I made a recording on a new TDK SA 90 via my Beogram 4004 (Miles Davis: Porgy and Bess, a nice pressing from the 70's; CBS 32188). It worked beautifully! The Beocord worked and responded like new (well, almost...see below). I pressed the record button, and adjusted the level sliders to yield a signal just below the red indicators, then re-set the tone arm to the beginning of the track ("The Buzzard Song"), and pressed Start. The 5000 started recording. After the song was over, I stopped and rewound, and played back. It was perfect. I am quite amazed of the quality of this 1977 deck's reproduction. Almost no difference, just a bit more hiss (I did use Dolby NR, though). Here is a first impression of the deck in action with and without the plexiglass cover:

What a beautiful machine! I just love the internal layout...wonderful analog pre-microcontroller design work. A slight downer of this blissful moment: Unfortunately, further playing around revealed that the Fade function is not (yet) working...well, tomorrow is another day! I am sure I will get this figured out, too!