What's wrong with my TEACH A-3440?

[ARGH!!]

There are two things that i'm wondering about the machine.

First of all, the input levels are very low, like it's always on mice att, i suggest i just need to clean something, right?

That's not the biggets problem. When i hear the old tapes, it plays fine but when i record (even if i just record all 4 tracks to delete what's on the old tapes) there is some wierd noise. It kinda sounds like some lighty stormy wheather, do any of you can help me out what it is? My dad is camera/radio engineer so he can fix it. But it would be cool to know what's wrong.

side note: all 3 heads have been cleaned so that's not the problen either.

 

[bobboyer]

I've had a good tech look at everything on mine as there's a lot of hiss from the playback side of mine, as well. Both of us have been talking with another tech who was a Teac/Tascam factory tech years ago, as well, for advice. The tapes it records are nice and quiet when played on other machines, but playing them back on the machine that created them results in a fair amount of hiss, even when recorded at average +3 levels on a +6 tape. Everything about my deck is very nicely in spec so I'm going to try a DX-4D dbx processor to see if it's just that the machine is designed to work with dbx. That's the only clue we're left with.