The ultimate vintage hi-fi system - Soundesign 5988
just when you thought 1970s hi-fi gear couldn't get any more ostentatious we've reached the ultimate it's the king of all things holy chrome and wood grain it's the stereo system that Disco Stu would've owned it's the stereo system for people who drove those huge American land yacht cars and like them that way yes it's the Soundesign PLL AM/FM stereo receiver 8-track cassette recorder model 5988 it has a total of 30 buttons, eight switches, and seven knobs just to show you how gigantic this thing is here's a standard double cassette deck the Soundesign is almost 6 inches wider and is about two and a half times as high as for how much this magnificent system cost when it was new I found it in the 1983 Blue Book of Quality Merchandise and including a pair of two-way speakers with 8-inch woofers and 3-inch tweeters it had a list price of $559.95 but it could be yours for the bargain price of $349.99 that's over $1,100 in today's money so yeah it's actually from the early 1980s but people associate chrome, woodgrain and 8-tracks with the 1970s so that's my story and I'm sticking with it on the back it has screw terminals for two pairs of 8 ohm speakers two sets of phono inputs for different types of cartridges including a ground terminal and terminals for an internal or external FM antenna; the AM antenna is also built in and there it is Soundesign model 5988 Made in Japan and if you can manage to get this gargantuan wooden box flipped upside down you'll find the entire schematic diagram printed on the bottom luckily I don't have to rely on that because I have the service manual which includes a full-size schematic there's a lot to go over here but you can break it down into five basic components all contained in this one huge box: you get a digital clock and timer, an amplifier, an AM/FM radio tuner, a cassette recorder, and an 8-track recorder the vacuum fluorescent digital display of the clock is what you first see when you plug it in even before you turn it on and you get some controls here for setting the clock but you can also operate it as a timer to turn on the stereo system at a specific time and also as a sleep timer to automatically turn it off after a certain amount of time has elapsed that was the sleep timer automatically turning off the radio you can set it for up to one hour but one little quirk I noticed is that instead of having separate AM and PM indicators or only a PM indicator like many digital clocks when it goes to AM it actually adds a little segment onto the P to turn it into an A as you can see which I find kind of strange here are the controls for the amplifier which is the heart of the system obviously in the middle you get the large round volume control and the typical bass and treble controls to either emphasize or attenuate the high and low frequencies and also a balance control to shift the sound more to one side and here are all the buttons to select the various inputs: FM Auto gives you FM radio in stereo, regular FM is mono, you also get AM radio, and two turntable inputs: one for a turntable with a ceramic phono cartridge another for a turntable with a magnetic phono cartridge, and a tape mode for the built-in cassette and 8-track decks you may notice there's no dedicated line level auxiliary input however the ceramic phono input can double as one the impedance won't be correct but with most components you won't notice any difference and one more thing I didn't mention yet is the quarter-inch headphone jack of course no stereo system would be complete without bouncing needles flashing LEDs that kind of stuff so you get these two red LED power level indicators which illuminate as you turn up the volume and these meters come into play whenever you're recording or playing a tape "I am speaking from the left my name is David" "I am speaking from the right my name is Mary" and over here you get even more buttons you can select between either just the main pair of speakers or the main and remote pairs of speakers you get a loudness button which boosts the bass at lower volume levels to improve the sound quality especially when using smaller speakers and you get low and high filters also known as rumble and scratch filters it looks silly to put a Minichanger on top of such a big stereo system but this allows me to demonstrate the ceramic phono input and a BSR record changer is almost guaranteed to be exactly the kind of turntable a system like this would have originally been used with just one of the full-size versions instead of this compact version and if you want to use a higher quality turntable then the magnetic phono input also works fine and sounds good the amplifier has a uniform output power rating of 10 watts and the specifications confirm that the ceramic phono input does double as an aux input so for example you can connect a CD player just too bad they didn't come in chrome and woodgrain to match the styling "hi, this is Dick Bartley for fascinating inside stories on the greatest hits of the '60s and '70s and where to find them on Compact Disc join me here Monday through Friday for New Gold on CD" up here is the radio tuner with a nice large analog tuning dial although I must say the markings on it are not the easiest to read and the dial pointer is supposed to be illuminated but unfortunately the little light bulb in it has burned out but that's not all you get because if you push this button here that says frequency display the clock turns into a digital readout of the frequency you're tuned to so it's an analog tuner with a digital display which I think is really neat and it pulls in plenty of stations so the FM reception is very good now let's try AM the reception on AM is not as good but it's adequate for pulling in your favorite right-wing talk stations and also your news and sports stations and if you're lucky a good music station on AM as well and again you get that optional digital readout on AM and it goes in 1 kHz increments so you can really fine tune in those stations "11:03 here on WTOP on this Wednesday night May 22nd, 2024 Hyattsville at 78° and falling to the 60s good evening I'm Dimitri Sodus the top local stories we're following this hour we do have a couple little thunderstorms that popped up" and back over on FM if you want to reduce the hiss of a weak FM stereo signal without needing to drop out into mono mode that's where this high filter comes in handy it doesn't make a massive difference but it helps to take the edge off and make it a little bit more listenable and on FM the muting button mutes the audio and until you've tuned in the station so you don't get that static between stations as you tune across the dial and one weird quirk is that you can invoke the frequency display at any time even when the tuner is turned off resulting in it giving you a totally bogus reading like 152 MHz the cassette deck has a nice soft eject door and it supports Type I normal Type II Chrome and Type III ferrochrome tapes these were supposed to give you the best of both worlds by using a combination of ferric and chrome formulations but they never really caught on and they were quickly phased out in the early 1980s when Type IV Metal tapes were introduced you may recognize this cassette mechanism because it was very commonly used in stereo systems in the late 1970s and early 1980s it was actually made by Tanashin it's their TN-57 mechanism and it is a rather clunky affair the buttons have a long travel and require quite a bit of force to activate but does have quite a ferocious fast forward and rewind and one quirk is that you can actually pause the fast forward it does auto stop when you're playing or recording but does not auto stop when you're rewinding or fast forwarding part of the reason for that clunkiness is that it's very ruggedly built it's not uncommon for these to still be working fine on the original belts such as this one is and keep in mind I have not done any repairs to this entire stereo system I haven't even cleaned the heads all I've done is used it and that has actually helped it improve a lot because when when I first got it all of these buttons were scratchy and had problems with crackling and channels dropping out but simply using it more and constantly pushing these buttons to help scrape away some of that oxidation has really improved it the specifications for the cassette and 8-track playback and recording aren't that impressive but at least when it was new it had a wow & flutter of 0.1% and a tape speed accuracy of within 1% both of which are very good "Pontiac would like to thank you for choosing a 1992 Trans Sport and welcomes you to driving excitement" "your new Trans Sport will turn heads with its dramatic styling the advanced design space frame is strong yet lightweight and composite polymer thermoplastic body panels will resist dings, dents, and rust" the tape deck does not have Dolby noise reduction instead it gives you Soundesign's own noise reduction circuit called NRC the NRC is only for playback it has no effect on recording and it's just a fixed lowpass filter so it's not as sophisticated as Dolby noise reduction but it does help to reduce tape hiss especially with voice recordings "so he came home drunk his wife said where were you? he said I was at the golden café honey and they have a golden urinal in the men's room he said I don't believe such a thing she says well call him up he says hello is this the golden café? I'm sorry to bother you but you have a golden urinal in the men's room? he said hold on he said hey boss I just found the idiot who peed in the saxophone" recording to tape is where I encounter the one problem with this system and that is these loosey goosey recording level controls now they do actually still work when I turn them up and down you can see it affects the recording level on the meters but obviously this is not correct and this knob is not even the right one because it should match the other ones nonetheless I'll give you a little sample of something I recorded from FM radio to Type III ferrochrome cassette tape "Magic 98.3 Brett Radler with today's hits yesterday's favorites and my fingers crossed that the thunderstorms they're predicting for Monday don't roll through. I was really hoping to get to the Metuchen Memorial Day
parade on Monday -- it's like a Central Jersey tradition. You planning on going?" and finally you get a pair of microphone inputs so you can sing along to your favorite music and record it to tape "testing the left hello hello OK that's working and testing the right that one is not as loud that's better so right channel left channel let me turn that one up as well hello OK" and last but not least is the 8-track recorder yes it can record as well as play and it has some other features you don't normally get on an 8-track deck including pause as well as fast forward although that's really just just playing at two times speed so it's not that fast of a fast forward but it's better than just having to wait for the whole thing to play through you also get auto eject either after the end of each program or after the end of the entire tape and you also get a button to power eject it instead of having to manually yank it out of the hole like you normally do on an 8-track player the 8-track deck also uses a mechanism made by Tanashin the TN-999 but unfortunately like so many later 8-track mechanisms it uses a plastic head carrier which has cracked with age you can see it right there in the upper right corner where the plastic has cracked and in my experience if you try to use regular super glue to glue that plastic back together as soon as you tighten down the head it's just going to split apart but luckily in the past I've had good luck using this Loctite plastics bonding system for hard to bond plastics I repaired another 8-track deck with that same problem using this and even after several years it's still holding together just fine so that's what I'll do with this one as well but in the meantime it's still working well enough that I can demonstrate it you just might hear some crosstalk in the quiet parts because the head alignment is not correct and even with that head alignment problem this sounds very good for an 8-track player I was really surprised and yes the NRC does work on the 8-track as well as the cassette and if you want to record on an 8-track you just hold down the record button and stick in the cartridge and you're recording but unfortunately I find recording on an 8-track to be very frustrating and time-consuming because you can't rewind so there's no way to tell how well the recording is coming out unless you wait to have it play all the way through and then come back around to where you started and there's no way to tell how much tape is left you're shooting in the dark as far as whether or not the song you're recording will fit on the program before it reaches the end nonetheless I did make some recordings from the radio to 8-track so I'll give you a sample of what that sounds like "hanging out in the back sun room on the patio and that song comes on it just sounds and feels like summer it's Magic 98.3 with the most music all weekend long keeping it fun and upbeat I mean we always do but I feel like we have upped our game even more because that's just everybody's mood right celebratory Dua Lipa always gets you on the dance floor it's her latest Houdini on Magic" and yes you can use it to copy an 8-track to a cassette or a cassette to an 8-track although I imagine the former was much more popular than the latter when this was new and 8-tracks were on their way out and people were replacing them with cassettes here's a look inside and aside from some cobwebs and dead spiders it was surprisingly clean in here the tuning dial mechanism is flywheel weighted and there you can see that tiny little burned out light bulb in the dial pointer it looks like there's provisions for two other light bulbs to be installed to backlight the tuning dial which definitely would have been useful but I guess with this digital readout they thought the analog dial was of less importance here's a look into the cassette mechanism it uses a Mabuchi motor and the belts are still fully intact they don't show any signs of melting and turning into goo like so many other old belts do but they definitely could stand to be changed and it has a nice big metal flywheel in there there's the 8-track mechanism it has a Nippon audio motor and there you can get a better look at the crack in the plastic head carrier but the belt is still fine you don't want it to be too tight because that'll strain the motor and actually increase the wow & flutter so it's OK if it has a little bit of slack just as long as is it's still good enough to run the mechanism and there are those two recording level potentiometers and yeah obviously that's not correct so that needs to be tightened I think what happened is that when you go to pick this huge thing up there's no handle to help you so you tend to grab onto the knobs and these two just happen to be in the middle where you're most likely to hold on to them to pick it up so that put a lot of extra force on these and unfortunately I will need to remove this front panel to tighten these and as for a date of manufacture I found one on the 8-track mechanism November 10th of 56 but that's not 1956 that's 56 of the Japanese Showa calendar which corresponds to 1981 I know I have a reputation of being an apologist for cheap audio components yeah guilty is charged but I must say I'm very impressed with the Soundesign 5988 despite its totally over-the-top styling nothing on it feels flimsy or gimmicky and the fact that it's all still working perfectly with no repairs needed deserves to be applauded and come on who can't be a sucker for the woodgrain, all this chrome, the vacuum fluorescent display, analog meters, and flashing red LEDs? I wouldn't pay the highly inflated prices that I know eBay sellers are going to start charging for this model in the wake of this video but if you ever happen to come across one of these it's definitely worth picking up if you can lift it which is going to be a challenge
2024-06-01 01:47
