Quasar VR-1000

[starbond]

Originally Posted by starbond

The tracking issue may be more of a tape issue than anything. Unfortuantely the only stock of tapes I have to work with were my fathers from the late 70s-mid 80s, which were stored in poor conditions AND in a basement flood. Most of the tapes have little patches of mold across the edges of the spools. I fear the tapes themselves are not much of a better quality. I keep cleaning the tape head every few hours but there isnt a a whole lot I can do.
I will run the adjustments on head speed tonight and go through all the points on the service manual, once I give the video head a good cleaning again.

So it seems I have at least one tape that plays well, and quite well. Which again leads me to think the tracking issues are the tape itself, worn and brittle from years of bad storage. However one very interesting observations: every single one of the BLUE (VC100) tapes seems to have degraded much much worse than any of the ORANGE (VC120) tapes. I dont know if it was a different formula or a bad batch or what, but of the 5 blue tapes I have left, they all play poorly.