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MasonDixon
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Everything posted by MasonDixon
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If you are at all adept with a cotton swab and isopropyl alcohol, you can try very gently cleaning your optical laser lens. And a very gently applied puff of gas from a can of Blow-off canned duster might also work. Sounds definitely like a dirty optical system. Mason
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Gary, if you are still interested, I repair Sony minidiscs. See my ID on eBay- jacques.noir Contact me if you haven't repaired your unit for further information. Masondixon
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First, you can't get the record head to lower while the lid is open. But, if you took the lid off and tried to get it to work, you need to actuate 3 switches to get anything to happen, then you might possibly see whether the record head does indeed touch the disk. There is a motor and gear train that is responsible for lowering the head while in record mode, but the only way to make sure it all works is to take it lid off and turn the gear train by hand. There isn't any way that it won't go all the way down, so it would have to be a mechanical obstruction in the gear train or lid lockdown mechanism. Otherwise, the electronics are at fault. If you know your way around the Sony calibration and test routine in the player, you can determine where in the system the problem is. Jacques
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Not only does the record head ride nearly on top of the disc, it rides ON the disc. Check R37, R50, R55, R700, R900, N707, N410, etc, etc. I've been repairing these things for months now, and if the record head doesn't ride on the disc surface itself, you WILL have problems recording. I found a tiny spec of what looked like styrofoam on one of my repairs and removing it restored the recording function. I am going to get an N1 in for repair for exactly the same problem as is described here, and I will apply the excellent repair suggestions enumerated above and see what happens. Most of the MDs I work on the record head tape is soldered to the main board. Sometimes the foils are broken at the solder pad, which is easily repaired. The rest of the assembly is very robust, particularly the record head, and unless the user stuffs a screwdriver into the load area, doesn't need much attention. If you have a pair of Optivisors 8x you can then really determine that the record head is designed as a sort of sled itself, with flutes in it to keep dirt from sticking to it. Also, using the same techniques to observe the disc rotating while recording or playing, you will always notice some runout between the disk and the heads. There is no way you can adjust a clearance tolerance between the record head and the disc to accommodate for that. The head has to ride on the disk, period. Read up on the Magneto Optical recording techniques to corroborate this. Thanks, Mason
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See if the line that shows output on the display is working. If you have sound output indication, then you have an audio/headphone problem. Otherwise, it appears that the record head is DOA, or as I have found, the main board is not sending the sound modulation to the disc. The record head is a very simple circuit, so unless someone stuffed some foreign material into the recorder and broke the record head wires, I would think the main board is at fault.
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Hi- I'm a first time user here. I do MD repairs for a hobby and was testing an MZ-N510 by loading 50 tracks of text files to see how fast it would go with SS 3.1 under WinXP Pro SP2. Everything worked perfectly, so I returned all the files to the Library to erase the disk, only to find 1 track could not be returned. The diagnostic was that it was made on a different computer than that which was being used to return the track. Of course that wasn't true, as the whole upload was done as a batch. OK, are you ready? How the dickens do I get rid of this renegade track? The copy protection won't let me do anything with it. And I can't find anything so far in this forum that addresses this problem. Thanks for any help. I am good at repairing these neat little rigs, so if you have any questions or need repairs, post em. Jacques
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I'm sure this has been covered here somewhere, but rather than spend hours searching through the archive, I decided to post a question about it. I just erased a functioning minidisc to BLANKDISK on my MZ R55. Alas when I tried to record to it a little while later the display came up with the " DISC ERR" diagnostic and halted. No efforts to reerase or record to the disk were successful. Other discs work fine, so it seems this one disc has the problem. Any way to rescue it? Thanks, Mason
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You have done an incredible job of writing a very good article about replacing the ribbon cable with wires. In it you make a statement about the magnetic head riding above the minidisc a certain distance from the disc during record. In my MZ R55 this head rides right ON the disc during record. As there is no optical function to the magnetic record function side of the disc, there is no harm in scratching it. I have 2 or 3 discs that function perfectly with some minor scratches on them. Maybe Sony redesigned this part of the machine in later models but the closer the magnetic record head is to the disc, the more effective its signal is on the laser input to the disc. Thanks, Mason
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If you'ld like I can perhaps repair your model, as I have a junker that has all the mechanical parts in good order. Contact me at : masondixon@netzero.net. Mason