Hey people, I'm José Miguel from Spain. I've always been interested in retro tech (initially just retro computing, but I got into many other things) so obviously I've always had cassettes in the back of my mind. I used to own a second-hand "walkman" (my cousin's old cheap device) but it's been a long time since the last time I saw that unit working... Anyways, for the last months I've been looking for a WM-D6(C?) unit to create and listen to some mixtapes (ideally I'd like to gift one to a friend of mine) until I got a good-looking WM-D6 marked as "non-working but the motor spins" at a nice price to see if I could make it work or find somebody who could. Tough luck: it plays really fast and smart people here suggesting a dead IC near impossible to find in the wild are scaring me, but I'll post about that later. But let's keep this on point: I'm really interested in learning more about the inner workings of these machines and how they were used. I particularly enjoy how straightforward (albeit complex!) these mediums are: the basics of their working mechanism can be understood intuitively quickly. As a software engineer I'm used to digital stuff with layers upon layers of abstraction, and everything being an abstract entity handled by the same device "the processor". Analog devices feel closer to reality, and using them brings a different kind of reward.
Hey, thanks! It's been a while since the last time I used a proper forum and I forgot about how warm these communities were: a section for people to introduce themselves is actually pretty nice
Welcome to the forum! I always recommend My Mate Vince on YouTube, he's fixed Walkmans in the past plus just about everything else. I like his style, it's similar to mine but he's gotten really good over the last few years. The videos are long so it's nice to have something like other work going on but he's got great tips. https://www.youtube.com/c/Mymatevince/search?query=walkman For cool books and manuals, archive.org is the place, I've searched soldering and 300,000+ books come up, I highly recommend signing up for books that need to be checked out online. The website search engine stinks, use google to search for topics on the website. https://archive.org/search.php?query=soldering&sin=TXT
Cool info, thanks! I like these kind of videos a lot, although I didn't know this channel. As for archive.org... yeah, it's definitely one of the best places in the whole internet. Its mere existence still boggles me: a web which stores tons and tons of valuable information, for free, as a public service for the whole humanity to enjoy. I use it quite often to find information otherwise almost impossible to get.
I know suggesting repair videos can be annoying but his style is very listenable and he fixes just about everything, sometimes I feel like I'm watching an old English Comedy Show, "Look what I just found?" We have some world-class members on the forum that also know some of these machines inside and out, I just buy a lot of everything and hope it works, if not I'll pull one apart and mess around for fun.
