P
peccary
New member
I picked this A4 up off Reverb the other week. I'd been wanting an 8-track reel to reel machine for a while now to pair with my Tascam M-35 mixer, but the cost of 8 track machines was pricing me out as a home recordist.
I saw this Fostex A4 listed for a pretty good price because the seller said that it had some input/output issues. They said that the output was lacking bass on the output and that there was a lot of distortion on the input.
I'm pretty comfortable digging into old electronics and I figured that for what he was asking I would take the chance, feeling confident I would be able to fix any issues. Belts seem easy to source and I am comfortable with a soldering iron.
My first step was to clean it up before doing any testing. I spent some time this morning going through the tape path with a bunch of q-tips and cleaner from Splicit and man, was it dirty. I'll post a photo of the q-tips below.
This came in the original box with the original styrofoam. Whatever life this machine lived before it got here was fairly well pampered as there's hardly a mark on it. Even the feet look new. I just think that they never took the time to clean the tape path, honestly.
After getting the heads and tape path nice and clean I threw a new reel of tape on (after doing my first splicing job, attaching some leader tape - that felt pretty cool to do!) and recorded a song to it from my Tascam 424 and... it appears to work perfectly fine. The recording sounded better playing back on the R2R than it did it did in the 424.
I will do more testing later when I can clear some space for it on my desk, but I didn't notice any obvious recording or playback issues. VU meters, lights, transport, everything seems to work. Playback is great, recording is great.
I haven't peeked inside yet - I'm going to try to do that this Sunday. But I plan to replace the belts and PS caps. Once I get inside I can see if anything else needs work as well. I've got to learn to bias it as well. I can't wait to use this to do some recording - I'm pretty excited about it.
Here's a couple of photos:
Nastiness removed from the tape path:
Connected to my 424:
Some closeups of the front:
I saw this Fostex A4 listed for a pretty good price because the seller said that it had some input/output issues. They said that the output was lacking bass on the output and that there was a lot of distortion on the input.
I'm pretty comfortable digging into old electronics and I figured that for what he was asking I would take the chance, feeling confident I would be able to fix any issues. Belts seem easy to source and I am comfortable with a soldering iron.
My first step was to clean it up before doing any testing. I spent some time this morning going through the tape path with a bunch of q-tips and cleaner from Splicit and man, was it dirty. I'll post a photo of the q-tips below.
This came in the original box with the original styrofoam. Whatever life this machine lived before it got here was fairly well pampered as there's hardly a mark on it. Even the feet look new. I just think that they never took the time to clean the tape path, honestly.
After getting the heads and tape path nice and clean I threw a new reel of tape on (after doing my first splicing job, attaching some leader tape - that felt pretty cool to do!) and recorded a song to it from my Tascam 424 and... it appears to work perfectly fine. The recording sounded better playing back on the R2R than it did it did in the 424.
I will do more testing later when I can clear some space for it on my desk, but I didn't notice any obvious recording or playback issues. VU meters, lights, transport, everything seems to work. Playback is great, recording is great.
I haven't peeked inside yet - I'm going to try to do that this Sunday. But I plan to replace the belts and PS caps. Once I get inside I can see if anything else needs work as well. I've got to learn to bias it as well. I can't wait to use this to do some recording - I'm pretty excited about it.
Here's a couple of photos:
Nastiness removed from the tape path:
Connected to my 424:
Some closeups of the front:
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