Tape Trail

Reel to reel, cassette and other analogue tape formats.

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RE: Are Tandberg Decks Known To Be Unreliable?

Posted by niklasthedolphin on January 24, 2012 at 06:30:55:
I have a little funny story in an attempt to wake up your optimism a bit again.

Once in between You write about how much you have paid for repair or service on you TCD 3014/A.

I would like you to consider the criteria defining the best guy to repair or service a given tape deck?

For one of my open reel decks, I managed to find the Chief Engineer from the factory where it was manufactured.
In fact he was the person in charge when designing / constructing this actual tape deck.
He also had service assignments at studios around the world later on, maintaining these decks.
He still does this ad hoc in all parts of the world.

I could ask if there could be any person closer to perfect for the service job on my tape deck?
IMO: Not really.

Ok, this deck was not really broken. It's built to last. Not comparable with any cassette deck in this respect.

There was, lately, an issue about keeping steady speed and recently there had occured a signal interruption to the record head.

This has been fixed, everything has been optimized, alligned, lubricated, cleaned up and everything works as if it was a new deck.

Now it would be natural if you then would think: "Damn, that's gotta be expensive. Much more expensive than what I paid for each of my attempts of repairing my TCD".

I paid less than $100 for this.
In a country where everything is way more expensive than the US, where taxes are the highest in the world, where one workshop hour usually and generally will set you back close to $200.

It's obvious that those tech guys charging you big gold for ruining your deck serves only few purposes; to cheat people, make a lot of money and ruin great gear.

Some DIY guys are good at fixing cheap gear and ruining great gear.

Try to make much more research and talk to a lot of people about their skills, what they have experience servicing, from where they got there technical skills, what gear they are used to listen to and / or service, have a look inot their service "shop".
The best service guys will probably only have fun and great gear for repair/service. So if you spot a lot of Technics, B&O, Pioneer or other plain consumer gear, steer free of him.

Are you aware that pinch rollers for TCD 3014 are still easy available as spare parts out there?

"dolph"