Sony TC-366-4 Reel to Reel Player

About

This is a thing of magnificence. A 4 track player designed to provide quadrophonic sound (the early equivalent of surround sound), this beautiful beast is, alas, currently unusable.

Machine history

This was bought locally together with the TC-377 for £100. See the post about the TC-377 for details about the acquisition.

Faults

Note: This is not exhaustive, these are only the faults and fixes I’ve experienced.

All 4 channels output wildly differing levels and quality of audio

This is particularly annoying as I’m able to capture all 4 channels on my laptop simultaneously, meaning standard tapes could be captured in a single pass if this was functioning.

Take up spool slipping

Standard maintenance

Belts

All belts are relatively easy to get to. With zero experience I was able to open the machine and swap out all belts in less than an hour.

Incidentally I don’t know if the belts in this machine had recently been changed, but I found the ones I removed had little give in them and probably would have been fine for quite a while.

Head cleaning

The heads are readily accessible by just pulling the front middle cover off, exposing the entire tape path. IPA on the metal parts and heads (not rubber parts) greatly improved playback accuracy.

I found it useful to use an endoscope to inspect the cleanliness of the heads. Although they visually looked shiny and clean the scope showed crud build up around the outer edges of the heads. Persistent but gentle cleaning soon got the heads looking spic and span.