Have been on the lookout for Walkmans and decent cassette players for a while, and managed to grab a Sony WM-FX199 off a seller in Delhi. It was listed for 1k, for parts or repair, and fault was mentioned as no power. While it’s not a special model, or one that’s highly sought after (looks like was a low cost entry in the SEA markets, primarily), it was pretty cheap, and they generally don’t develop an electronics fault. From seller photos heads also looked very pristine, and I pulled the trigger.
When it arrived, Radio (FM + AM) was working fine, pressing play on tape mode would light up the power LED, but there was no sound or movement. Decided to open it up, and downloaded the service manual. On a closer inspection, the motor was running, but it was impossible to hear, except when starting up, and the manual shows this uses a 3 phase motor (!! insane really, service manual photo attached).
The electronics are all fine, as is the motor. The fault was that the belt had disintegrated entirely. I made a makeshift “repair” with a rubber band. Everything sorta works now, but sounds terrible, due to the rubber band (it needs proper belts, rubber bands will cause speed deviation and variation, called “wow and flutter”). Proper replacement belts are on the way from Ukraine and Slovakia, as is a 3khz calibration tape.
The belts and calibration tape have cleared customs and on their way to me. In anticipation, I decided to capture some direct audio (using motherboard Line In). The Grammy Tape I have sounds amazing, but the Backstreet Boys tape sounds crunchy, and is leaving residue on the tape head.
On to some analysis, using VB-Audio Spectralissime on the direct feed, first I captured the noise floor, with MegaBass (Sony EQ) on
You can easily see the V-Shaped tuning they did. After that, played a song, “Soul Meets Body” by Death Cab for Cutie from the Grammy Nominees tape (the good tape), and if I ignore the speed variation/warbling, frankly sounds amazing. Here’s a spectrum when playing the song
What looks impressive to me is how even the highest frequencies are represented (and the quality is audible, does not sound muffled at all). There are some inaccuracies in this spectral plot, as the tape is running slightly faster, so frequencies are raised, and there’s some spectral leakage in the plot on the higher frequencies, but the fact remains that it can do really high frequencies. Will upload an audio sample later.
While I am waiting for the shipment, I will continue my hunt for a Dolby C capable walkman, and a Dolby S capable deck. It’s essentially NR (noise reduction), but Dolby has stopped licensing their NR since long back, and newly built cassette players won’t have the feature.
As promised, here’s a link to a direct recording of the playback, no processing has been applied.
This is a 44.1Khz/16bit FLAC file, which should ensure there’s no extra artifacts added due to compression (yes, I do understand how hilarious it is that I’m encoding cassette audio into CD quality FLAC lol).
