This thing is crazy. It’s this giant cassette deck with an ultimate late '70s look to it. Those huge vertical VU meters, LED “Spectropeak” display, that power button, those piano keys, beautiful.
It’s in impeccable condition, all the knobs are there, not even a scratch on the cassette door window.
It’s massive, super heavy and huge. Inside it’s amazing, it’s a basic single motor mechanism but everything’s huge in there. Huge motor, gigantic flywheel, and some kind of internal secondary chassis to hold stuff in place. Belt’s slack though, at least it ain’t goopified.
It doesn’t do Dolby but has ANRS and Super ANRS, some kind of alternative noise reduction system.
It didn’t power up at the Renaissance but it was 15$. It will make a decoration or bookend if, as I suspect, I will never attempt to repair it.
I need to figure out why it’s dead, there are three fuses according to the schematic but I didn’t spot them, so it looks like I have to disassemble further. Also there’s a SCR in the power supply, I’ve never seen that before. Like a lot of audio electronics, the schematics are drawn with everything as a net, I can’t quickly see where ground or power is, it’s all lines among the signals.
Either it’s a crowbar circuit (which was kind of common in big bench power supplies back then, never seen it in audio), or it controls the motor because of the timer function?