Summary of Restoring Reel-to-Reel Tape Recorder

Video Transcript

"For Expert Village, I'm Kurt, Chief Engineer at KGB Studios. We're continuing our series on how to restore a 4-track reel to reel tape machine. Three, okay, we'll play that same section again and, in this case, we'll adjust, a very much more fine grained adjustment at this point, while we're watching the playback on the heads themselves down here. And again, it's kind of a cross between the head and the VU meter. Now there's another way to do this which, unfortunately, I don't have the capability to do. As you can see, I'm making a small, little adjustment and it can adjust the heads quite substantively. Up here on both these playback and record heads, very interesting here, you turn that a little bit and that's how you make your adjustment. There is one other way that you can do this and that is you actually use an oscilloscope to set what they call the lissajous curves, and I'll include a couple of pictures of a lissajous curve, as we go through this piece of the sessions. Anyway, that's how you actually do an alignment there for the record head. So, as you can see here, as we close this session out, you make an adjustment on the playback head and you kind of compare that to the meters down here. And then you go back to the record head and you adjust that as well. It's small little increments, don't get over excited about turning it a lot. You don't want to do that. You want to adjust those to where it's optimum and then you use, as you can see here, I actually used a little bit of nail polish to isolate that connection, or not connection, but I isolate the two right here. Because you want to do that by locking the screws in place so that heads do not move when you don't want them. So you definitely need to do that. Anyway, that's the situation for actually doing an adjustment on the record head and the playback head. Alright, so that probably just about wraps it up for this session on Expert Village. I'm Kurt again, at KGB Studios in Seattle. It's been great showing you kind of the technical things about restoring a reel to reel tape deck. Till next time, take care. You can always email me and I can provide as much information as I know. Enjoy the session. Let me know what your feedback is. There's email and the links are there provided by Expert Village. Again, thanks from KGB Studios."