WARNING: GEEK/MINIDISC STUFF AHEAD.
I am a geek. I think that fact has been well established.
Ben tunes out the world by watching Drag Race news and reviews on YouTube, and I watch videos about how to fix broken stereo gear.
Those videos have gotten me into trouble more than once, giving me a false sense of proficiency when in fact I had none. But those are stories for another time.
I’ve been able to find videos describing how to take apart and fix just about every piece of audio gear I own—with two notable exceptions: my Tascam MiniDisc decks.
There are plenty of videos of people showing them off, describing how they work, or were obviously created for providing “proof of life” to potential buyers in an eBay auction. And so many of those videos are based out of Vietnam. WTF? Did Tascam saturate the Vietnamese market with these things?
In nearly a year of searching, I’ve found only one video that describes the actual repair of a misbehaving Tascam MD mechanism.
But why is that? There are literally dozens of repair videos for Sony units—portables and decks. With the decks, the most common malady is a decomposing rubber belt that prevents the minidisc from loading or ejecting—a simple fix once you obtain a new belt and see how it’s done. With the portables it’s almost always dried-up lubricant or corrosion from leaking batteries that someone failed to remove from the player twenty years ago. But Tascam? Just the one.
(Not that I need repair videos for these two units; they’re both working just fine. I just find the videos fascinating.)
Is this dearth of videos because the Tascams are built like tanks and simply don’t break down? They were sold as “professional” machines, intended to be used in recording studios and radio stations, so they were supposedly built to a higher standard (evidenced by the pictures below) than units manufactured for home use. But they were also marketed (in a silver finish with different model numbers) under their parent company’s Teac name, which was squarely a consumer audio company.
To point out the difference in build quality, this is my Sony…
vs. Tascam…
Or is it that Tascams don’t need repair videos created because the MD mechanisms don’t use any belts for loading and unloading the discs? The only belt I’m aware of is in the CD player portion of the MD-CD1MKIII and that drive is a standard, commercially available (at least at the time these were being built) IDE computer CD/DVD writer.
While it’s kind of disappointing that there’s only one Tascam MiniDisc repair video on YouTube, it’s also rather reassuring if this is indicative of their longevity, knowing that my two decks will likely keep humming along for many, many more years. (And there are more than enough Sony videos—of all their audio gear—that allow me to disconnect from the dystopian hellscape we currently find ourselves in.)