Loading…
9
Do you restore the deck or leave the patina? A picky collector in Portland got me thinking
I ran into a guy at a swap meet in Portland last August who had a mint 1979 Pioneer KPX-9000, but he refused to touch the faceplate because he liked the fade marks. I argued that a clean capstan and new belts matter more than the cosmetics, but he said the scars tell the story of every tape it ate. Now I'm torn, is my job to make it sound like 1980 again or keep the honest wear? What do you all do when a deck has visible years on it, restore or preserve?
2 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In2 Comments
jade3227d ago
Clean the tape path, leave the faceplate alone lol.
4
ninaross27d ago
Cleaning the tape path is the easy part, and nobody is arguing against keeping the heads and capstan in good shape. Where I part ways is the idea that a clean faceplate is somehow dishonest. That fade the collector loves came from sitting in a window, not from playing tapes, so it is not really "the story" of anything except sunlight. Doing fresh belts and a proper alignment is not erasing history, it is keeping the machine alive so it can keep making history. A deck that sounds right and looks clean is just a deck that got taken care of, and there is nothing fake about that.
4