Philips DCC decks - Service manuals? (DCC600)

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Scorpio(DDMF)!

Scorpio(DDMF)!

Member
Joined 2005
Hi,

I've acquired a first-gen Phillips DCC machine - the DCC600. It has some minor problems, which I would like to resolve and maybe tweak it a little - so a service manual would be of great help...

Unfortunately, it seems that the technical and service documentation on this unit (and other DCC decks) is quite scarce. :(

A service manual for this or any Philips DCC machines would be a great help in my endeavors, and much appreciated. :angel:

Maybe a datasheet for some of the used, now discontinued ICs, like M51581FP DIR even?

Thx in advance,

Cheers!

P.S. Almost forgot, my inbox is at scorpioddmf (add the special sign here) hotmail dot com ;)
 
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manxist

Member
Joined 2011
I got my old Philips DCC 91 cassette deck out recently to see if it still worked. All seemed well when I connected it up, and to my surprise the first DCC I put in the machine played perfectly and the sound was really superb. But then I started to try some of my other DCC tapes (I have many) and found to my dissappointment that a lot of them, mostly DCC90 tapes of various makes would not play in the machine. Cleaning the tape heads brought no improvement, but curiously, the tape that I had put in the machine first of all continued to play perfectly with complete reliabilty. I investigated further some of the tapes that wouldn't play and noticed that as the tape was passing through the machine I could hear a slight high pitched whine coming from the area of the head assembly inside the machine. I examined the DCC tapes closely and found a brown deposit on the pressure pad situated behind the tape inside the head aperture of the cassette. All the other DCCs that wouldn't play had the same brown deposit on this pressure pad inside the cassette. I concluded that the problem was tape jitter disrupting the data stream coming off the tapes.

I used a cotton bud dipped in some surgical spirit and carefully cleaned the pressure pads of the "bad DCCs" and after making sure that the pads had dried thoroughly (a hairdrier was useful here) I found that it did the trick and all of the tapes now played perfectly. This tip might be useful to anyone who still uses these machines.
 
A

atsirik

Member
Joined 2005
Sorry for resurrecting this old thread, but I wanted to post something I discovered, seems quite relevant to the last post. I own a dcc-900 which had trouble with some analog tapes: after playing back a while, the unit started "losing" high frequencies and when trying to play back a dcc tape, it would not read at all (service mode showed all FFFFs) and required head cleaning. After reading this post, I noticed the pressure pad was quite brown on the tapes with that problem, and decided to clean it with alcohol and let it dry. After that the tapes started to play perfectly till the end without "contaminating" the digital heads. I don't know why it worked but it's worth a try in case of such a problem. (Maybe the "dust" in the pressure pad, with the vibrations caused by tape movement was somehow contaminating the heads? - I also remembered some relevant article I had read some 20 years ago about a head clogging problem that had lead Philips engineers to redesign the pressure pad on digital tapes to avoid it).
 
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