Teac 144 record issue

C

CastawayMusic

New member
Hope someone can point me in a direction to fix this sentimental piece of gear. Teac 144 2 bus 1984. So I had not touched this thing for about three decades. Transport was non op. Replaced all the rubber and got the transport working. Plays back session tapes from thirty years ago just great. No issue with Playback. If I record something new on either bus what I get on playback is a wobbly somewhat distorted mess. I don't think the transport is the issue due to the great playback of tapes from back in the day. I feel like an adjustment in the record / bus circuitry or failure of a component of some sort in the record circuitry is to blame. If anyone has any hints or the name of a solid tech in SoCal, please let me know. Thanks!!
 
You’re probably correct, it’s not a transport issue if it can play back previously recorded tapes fine.

Any way you can post a link to a sampling of a current recording?

And it doesn’t matter whether you’re tracking the L buss to track 1 or 3, or the R buss to track 2 or 4 right? In any case the result is the same?

I don’t know if Adrian Pro Audio works on cassette-based machines, but they’ve been around for a long time and have a good reputation and they’re in SoCal. You could contact them and ask:

http://adrianproaudio.com/
 
Thank you so much for the reply! I went to recreate the issue to post the result to this forum and found that it was surprisingly better, not fixed, but much better. All tracks are recording and playing back much better, which adds to the mystery. The difference was I was using the headphone jack this time to monitor, and the unit was on much longer before I tried recording because I got caught up listening to old session tapes on the unit before I got around to recording, so I'm going to be doing some more testing. One of the big issues is a loose connection at the headphone jack (Faulty Jack 40 year old jack, go figure. :-) ) I got distracted today with other stuff but I was able to track down a tech close to me that I can take the unit to. TAP Electronics in Buena Park CA. I'm going to replace all of the 1/4" jacks before I take it in, that is within my skill level, then it should just be a tune up and maybe a cap or two hopefully. I'll let you know how it turns out.
 
Oh yea, thanks for the link, if I don't get a good feeling about this guy in Buena Park I'll get in touch with Adrian Pro Audio. Cheers!
 
Ok so I finally went in and removed the Headphone Jack, which was acting up and causing all sorts of issues, from the mixer board and gave the jack a solid cleaning and replaced it. While I had the mix board out I looked for contacts that needed to be re-flowed and found two of them. I put the board back in and then looked for contacts that needed to be re-flowed on the repro/amp board and found one. I put the unit back together and now everything works great. Recording is good and playback of new recording is now good. I didn't even lose any screws. :-)
 
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