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MDS-JB940

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M1JWR

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it should be titled what have you all been playing with since the spring, for about 2/3 months i diddent bother, then a 940 came up that i couldent resist, it had a very dodgy owh going by the pics, bit broken off it and looked a bit twisted, its been attacked by a numpty for some reason, and ive had a battle with an owh before, and lost !! but for 40 quid inc post i am not complaining, when i got it it was as discribed so i went and got a rough'ish on the outside 440 and put its drive in the 940 and after that the 940 worked spot on, the 440 became the test bed, it was a black bit that was broken down the side, ive strightned up the owh and glued on the broken bit and is now stable in that regard, fortunetly the contacts dont seem to be broken, its a bit unreliable, further testing is on going, the rest of that drive unit is fine, plays no problem.

next was 2 mds s50's, spares or repair for not a lot, one had a smashed front, the other ok but missing the ams knob, so the idea there is to resurrect one and break the other for spares, s50's etc are not the type i go for, these are ex bbc, however they have a little secret for those who dont know and the main reason why i bought them, they use mdm7a drive units, very handy and they are both working, main boards and psu's are also ok on both.

finally i bought a 440 cheap in good nick with a remote which can sell for as much as what i paid for the whole thing, stuck in standby and a buzzing noise was the discription, belt knackered and hopefully a disc stuck inside, well, no disc as it was half ejected so as somebody was able to get the disc out, this one was a little trickier, first thing was to push eject out manually to see if i could switch it on, not this time, put a new belt on next and see what it does, nope, the buzzing stopped and it went into a constant attempt to switch on loop, next was at the front on the drive there is a micro switch, i put switch cleaner on that and exersised the two little pins that stick up a few times also i dab of grease on the slides on the drive for eject as it was very dry and that seems to have cured that, wonder what the next one will be.

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just keep your eyes open kevin, they do crop up on a well known auction site, the jb's not so much, in that ones case i think the pics of the dodgy owh put a lot off, i see there is a silver 480 on there just now, at that price i wouldent touch it with a ten foot barge pole, its rough and no ams knob, so thats the other end of the scale, its worth about 20 quid !! I see we are being given badges just now, do you think anybody will get a blue peter badge. lol

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5 minutes ago, M1JWR said:

 I see we are being given badges just now, do you think anybody will get a blue peter badge. lol

We’ll have to explain that to non-UKers under 45!

With that last post it just told me I’m now ‘Apprentice’! Not bad for 712 posts!

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19 minutes ago, kgallen said:

I just had a browse. Prices are pretty high - usual silly BIN prices

Yeah, the BIN prices are almost always over the top and, in some cases, utterly ridiculous. There were a couple of 980s on there recently. One was £2000 and the other was £1000 😲

I spent some time looking at 930s a while back and the average sold auction price (including postage) was around £150 but the BINs at the time were generally more than double that.

I think patience is the key to getting one for a reasonable price and, as M1JWR has done, maybe picking up one in need of some work.

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the last spares or repair 940 went for 65 quid, probably needed a belt and had no feet, there is a couple of 640's on there just now, they usually go in the £60 area and over a ton fully working, sometimes a 930 can be a bit of a sleeper as no mdlp, a fine machine and in my book the best quality one of the jb series, 980's are a horrendous price for what is essentially a 780 in drag, and well over a ton for a broken one, a 440/470 for 20 to 30 quid needing a belt is a good buy when they crop up, can fetch 60 to 70 fully working especially if the remote is present then possibly more, ahh remotes, thats another crazy price area, then there is the guy selling drives for 980's at over a ton a pop, wow, out of 480's me thinks.

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2 hours ago, M1JWR said:

especially if the remote is present then possibly more, ahh remotes, thats another crazy price area

At least with remotes they're basically all compatible, in my experience at least, with only minor changes to add stuff like the Group function on the final couple of series of decks.

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yes the prices for Sony MD decks are in stupid territory. I was lucky I bought a couple of spare JB940s about 10 years ago for just £75 each buy collects in London. I did recently get a 480 purely for its drive for my JB980 just £45  or so incl postage. Some people even  want £100++++ for these. The best idea is to get a deck with digital out then  you upgrade it with an external DAC?

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I've used my Marantz SA8005 as an external DAC for an MDS-JB980 and it sounded really good. I didn't do any real comparisons with the onboard DAC though (it's one of the things on my "to-do" list) and the sound would have been a combination of the DAC/Amp/speakers in my living room compared to my office set up, so not really comparing apples to apples.

I keep meaning to get one of my decks permanently plumbed into my living room set up so once I've done that I'll do some tests.

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2 hours ago, kgallen said:

This external DAC idea is intriguing. Anyone actually find this is worthwhile audio wise? My bet is that most of these external DACs are using the same chipset Sony have been using in all but their earliest machines.

Yes I use an Audiolab 8200cdq and the sound is much better. Remember  you are not only using the DAC in the deck but also the analogue sound circuitry which though good is not the best.  I never found the digital filters on the deck made an improvement & I never liked the resulting sound of any of them. Also in my case since the dac is part of an all-in-one preamp thats one pair of interconnects no longer needed, just an optical cable, and one less thing to affect the sound. If you have a preamp with dac built in its a no brainer. Depends on whether  you are happy with the sound?

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strangely i have a marantz cd63se and use a mds jb930 as an external dac, the 930 does its own thing aswell, it makes the marantz sound better no end, i was always led to believe that the dac's in sony md decks are exellent to start with, probably one of the reasons why their compressed format sounds better than you think it should.

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The best thing that ever happened to my JB940 was when I hooked it up via optical (or coax, I forget what's back there) to my Cambridge Audio receiver. Nothing really wrong with the 940's DAC, just not quite on a par with some others, IMO; for example, JA20ES, JA333ES, and even the JB930. My ears, my call.

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9 hours ago, BearBoy said:

Great to see you've found your way back, Bluecrab 🙂

Why thanks! As far as I could tell, this forum went AWOL for quite some time. Its absence was noted elsewhere. I did take a peek behind the 940 (without disturbing the cat, who often lies on top the receiver), and found that there's coax out from the 940. I'm not sure the difference in the 940's sound is solely one of SQ. I like that it now sounds more like the other source (iTunes/streaming iMac), which also feeds the receiver, via dedicated optical. Difference in DACs, I suppose. There's kitty on the receiver—the 940 is just beneath her.

wakehifi.jpg

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1 hour ago, BearBoy said:

It did go AWOL for a couple of months until Christopher got everything back up and running just over a week ago.

Nice cat! I assume the receiver is a nice warm place to sit?

Right. I'm sure by now the receiver's insides are furry, but kitty is a rescue...can always get a new receiver if things went awry.

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On 8/10/2021 at 5:58 PM, BearBoy said:

It did go AWOL for a couple of months until Christopher got everything back up and running just over a week ago.

Nice cat! I assume the receiver is a nice warm place to sit?

ANy one have any opinion what the website was doing when it was off. Some times there was what seemed like  a blue set of sony menues but each option in the address bar had a very very long line of random characters that to my mind looked like some  kind of malware code,. So I thought the site had been hacked

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