can you rig up speed adjustment by adding pot to tape motor? for diy tape delay

koalabearsoup

New member
would it be that easy, just to put a pot between the positive cord and the positive lead on the motor of a tape player?

or would you need some sort of extra crap? is the speed of the motor just dependent on how much power is being put into it?

wanting to build tape delay

thank you
 
The short answer is no. Low end tape machines often us AC synchronous motors for the motor (Note one motor often does all of the work for the machine). It is not good practice to try to slow it down with resistance. As you move up the grades of machines, generally, the capstan motor becomes its own motor and is a servo motor with associated electronic controls that arent easy to mess with. Then you get fairly high up the food chain and the capstan motors show up with "vari-speed" which gives you a control to take the speed above or below the standard, usually something like +/-15%
 
Just had a bit of a "light bulb" moment! BUT! READ NO FURTHER IF YOU ARE NOT CONFIDENT WITH MAINS VOLTAGE ELECTRICS!!!!!

12V inverters of a few 100watts are very cheap these days. If you delved inside you might find a frequency trim pot that you could abstract and use as a speed control to an AC induction motor (many were single phase, shaded pole or capacitor start and run and not synchronous) .

But! Before you start messin' FCS make a precision (from a DAW) 1kHz test reference tape!

Dave.
 
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