hi,
I have a teac tape deck that is noisy. it hum/hiss even without a tape, worse with one.
Is it something relativly easy to fix or is it junk?

Thanks
Jay

 

Possibly easy to fix! - but it could be anything, also tape decks do tend to hiss and hum at high volumes, due to the extremely high gains involved.

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If I understand your information, you are saying that when the tape deck is selected as the source on your stereo/receiver, there is hum, or hiss. This noise gets worse when a tape is played?

If so... I would suggest that the filter capacitors in the power supply are bad. When there is no load, as when no tape is playing, there is hum from the power supply, when you play a tape, the load on the power supply is greater, so the humm gets louder.

Hiss is usually noise in the preamp circuits, but this can be indirectly caused by a bad power supply also, as mentioned above.

 

If it's no a three-heads type, contain a REC/PLAY function switch. Most of case the bad switch-contact make the noise and distortion. Try ten times switching to record mode, maybe help....

 

I'm scratching my head now since the noise seems to have gone.

I know it was not dependent on the tape, and it was really anoying.

I had it in a different place before; external distortion?
This deck has only a record level dial, so no amp?
It is plugged into a aux port of a cd player.

I'm going to find a clean tape and try to record from the cd, see what happens.

Thanks,
Jay

 

If you're in England, nine times out of ten any given fault will be caused by damp.
Try roasting it.

 

You may have had a ground loop. This is caused when the grounded interconnecting cables between equipment are at slightly different voltage causing current to flow. This will induce a mains frequency hum on the effected devices. Normaly all the equipment should have their sheilds and grounds at zero volts relative to each other, but faulty gear, or bad cables can start a ground loop.

One common cause of this can be when a TV or Cable TV box is connected to a stereo receiver, and the cable TV line coming into the building has its shield "floating" slightly above ground.

The easiest way to find a ground loop is to start disconnecting the signal cables from one piece of equipment at a time until the hum dissapears. In professional audio settings great pains are taken to avoid this, as it can be a nightmare to solve.

 

Wow.
The grounds thing is interesting.
I'm thinking about how the grounded wire in a 120v circuit develops a series load through induction.
It could not be much though, unless there was some coiling...
I'll ponder that some.
Neat how one noisy tape deck leads to a maze of topics.
That is one of my problems.
Wow, lookit that, wow, and this, and wow, wow...

It is hard to focus on one thing, without knowing all the other things.

Jay