This is an old Technics RS-615 cassette deck I had in for repair. It’s an old one without any of the newer Dolby systems.
A slightly unusual design in that the the tape sits at about 45 degrees rather than the more common vertical approach that most front loading decks used. A couple of filament bulbs light up the cassette area.
A couple of hidden thin plastic toys had become stuck in the mechanism preventing the cassette being dropped into position.
It was also slamming the right VU meter over as the circuit board was generating a large 12KHz signal on the output.
Faults repaired and the heads along with the capstan and pinch wheel cleaned it now works.
Recording various frequency tones from a signal generator showed the high frequency response to be severely reduced beyond 10KHz. That’s hardly surprising, the deck is ancient and the official spec showed it having a frequency response of 30Hz to 13KHz.
This is a short video of the cassette deck playing.
Later decks (by any manufacturer) using more modern Dolby systems and automatic tape bias had far better sound quality, but the writing was on the wall as the world was moving to CDs.
If you need some HiFi / audio equipment repaired or checking over please contact me for a quote.