Repairing and restoring a vintage 1970s Sony cassette deck, part 1!

It's time to tackle a project I've been building towards for years - repairing and restoring my Sony TC-K96R cassette deck. This was a deck released in 1978 (mine looks like it was built in 1979) and was a top of the line model. It was an early example of auto-reverse with a rotating head, full logic controls and even remote control. It was also dramatically overbuilt, with a tape transport that I would put up against any other deck in the world for durability. You could use the tape transport itself as a blunt force weapon; it's that heavy. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for its electronics, which in my unit are kind of a mess. The electronic components inside this deck have degraded over the years to the point of distorting the sound, and at least one component utterly fails and renders the deck unusable during my diagnostic attempt. Problems like these are much harder to diagnose than simple mechanical issues, especially when there are multiples of them. I hadn't intended this to be a multi-part video, but too many different things were happening to fit into one video of any reasonable duration. I have a companion video on my second channel where I talk a little more about repair videos like this one, check it out: https://youtu.be/IiqYG2-UYBw Part 2 is now available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKsyfJ1zqtc I promised a link to the Fnirsi 2C53T: https://amzn.to/4iIUxcY (That is an affiliate link and I will get a commission if you purchase. This video is not sponsored by them; I just like the product.) Music credits: National Sweetheart - A Prairie Dog Jeremy Blake - Let's Go Home Nico Staf - Walking in the Sky All from the YouTube Audio Library. 00:00 Intro 06:37 Demo and testing 19:02 Teardown 22:33 Transport service and belts 32:04 Headwire repair 33:50 New power problems! 40:26 Replacing transistors 46:47 It died again! 50:08 Power fixed, still no output! 54:03 New issues fixed and outro