Thursday, January 22, 2009

KD-D50 Manual Arrives

Okay, so now I have the service manual for the KD-D50. I will use this blog entry as a way of explaining to a few electrically-inclined friends what it is I want to do with the thing.

THE GOAL: Remove the LCD display from this 80s-vintage cassette deck and install it in a project box. I would like to be able to have stereo RCA connectors on this box to feed a line-level signal in so the box will serve as a stand-alone VU meter/spectrum analyzer. I would also like a volume pot on the thing to adjust the levels up and down (it would be great if I could use the slider pots in the deck, but I can use regular pots, too). Ideally, power would be from some wall wort-type of transformer.





Q. Why on Earth do I want to do this?
A. Well, it's complicated. This is the exact model deck I had as a teenager. A true child of the 80s, I loved making mixtapes on this thing and stared at this display for countless hours. I love it. I think that armed with the info in the service manual, doing what I hope to do should be easy.

Below is a photo I took of my deck back in 1984.



Long toasted, this unit was junked many years ago. Enter eBay. I purchased another for $9.99 and yet another for $14.99. Pretty cool, eh?

Ideas?

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