Repairs and upgrades of my Pioneer RT-909

I have recently acquired an impressive Pioneer RT-909 reel to reel. As it’s a 30 year-old machine, it needed a complete check and servicing as you may guess.
Here’s how it arrived. Not full of dust, but definitely dirty:
The rollers were also disintegrated:
And this is how the heads looked like. Full of dust but happily in excellent condition underneath the dust layer:
But after being in Sergi’s expert hands at his tech repair lab, now they look like this:
Awesome, huh? Now let’s get into it…
The motors worked perfectly, but the entire deck was full of dust:
so I asked Sergi to clean it thoroughly, both inside and outside:
Of course, he had to replace the old belt, which was almost melt down:
for a brand new one from Marrs communication:
The main board was also very dirty and had a lot of old caps that probably had loose part of their quality in all these years:
So a good cleaning and a new set of high-grade caps (including audiophile-grade Nichicon caps) would return the sound quality of its full glory… even better than when new:
See the right board with the new caps:
Here’s the full set of replaced caps:
And here’s my Pioneer working again:
Sergi (and I later) cleaned it externally, so it looked like new:
Want to see more photos? Take a look at this another post.
Want to see it in action? Don’t miss this!
Tags: Pioneer, R2R, Reel to reel, Repairs
This entry was posted on Monday, August 3rd, 2015 at 5:51 pm
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.