Yamaha kx-580 special edition

Records perfectly and also sounds great on other decks. The KX Special Edition is an excellent two head machine that sounds like a three head deck and is also very reliable. This is a very capable 2 head cassette deck and has very good sound quality. It has been my number one deck for a few years now and is still on it's original belts which are in good condition.

One problem that has reared it's head recently has been a clicking sound that appears to originate from the take up reel mechanism drive gears which is causing a modulation to appear on a continuous tone but is not noticeable on music.

Sound quality is pretty good, the differences between the original and the recording to my ears are minimal with half decent tape. Well worth finding a good one if you can. Buyers beware! I have purchased two of these special edition decks 2nd hand and both had the following faults.

The motor speed was slow this I corrected with the motor trimmer. A high pitched dentist drill sounded after an hours use. An the speed went too fast. Conclusion :- The capstan motor needs to be stripped down and re-lubricated or replaced completely on these decks.

Got spot-on with speed pot - though adjusting it feels like stirring jelly. While inside, I glued a pair of leds inside the cassette flap so I can see my old tapes tangling along. Borrowed power from plus minus 7. There may well be a more convenient switched tap-in if you're prepared to explore. Music really sounds better on-pitch. Outstandingly helpful and functional website!!!

My KX sat on a shelf too long. Mechanically excellent, and response is so good, it reproduces the 19kHz Zenith pilot tone on tapes made years ago from FM. That's just enough to make music sound slightly 'off'. The first two buttons on the top row are Play and Stop — nice and convenient — well done Yamaha!! These Intro Scan buttons, which search for gaps between tracks, are about the only concessions Yamaha make to convenience, but surely it would make sense for these to be placed underneath the more oft-used fast forward and rewind buttons?

Not only are the labels tiny and difficult to read, but the buttons and knobs are tiny and difficult to access. I envisage the flap being broken easily since it is necessarily open for a protracted length of time.

Finally, although there are only two sets of sockets on the back input and output, for connecting up to an amplifier , these are labelled using black protruded plastic against a black cassette deck body. Impossible to read, especially for those with failing eyesight. My amp a Rega Elex-R has inputs and outputs, labelled as such. So Yamaha has to buck the trend by calling their sockets Play and Record.

The Yamaha KX is a single cassette, 2 head, single capstan cassette machine. Take the aforementioned manual bias tuning, for instance. The KX will recognise automatically whether you are recording on normal, chrome or metal tapes, and set the bias accordingly, with no user input required. Not only this, but the user can easily trigger the Auto Tape Tuning function.

In the manual, Yamaha explain this feature in pigeon English, illustrated by an incomprehensible graph, but let me tell you that, simply put, this function not only tells the deck that a chrome tape is about to be recorded onto, but it also detects differences in formulations between different brands of chrome tape TDK, BASF etc… and sets itself up accordingly.

Therefore and Yamaha admit this the manual bias tuning is totally superfluous. However, Yamaha make the process of recording onto a blank cassette easy in a number of important ways. It was one of the bargains I picked up for 30p. It thrilled from the moment I put it on. Wow and flutter, with a good, non-deteriorated cassette count out most EMI recordings, sadly , is negligible, even with solo piano music, courtesy of the Brahms Hungarian Dances on Decca. Stereo separation was good, but again, just slightly veiled, so that the finer detail that places the performer right there in front of you was absent.

Never mind. Performances sound natural, detailed and involving. Beneath the buttons are a headphone jack and a row of five knobs for headphone level, bias adjustment, Play Trim, input balance, and recording level. They are all easy to operate and quite clearly marked. On the right-hand side of the front panel is the usual array of transport controls, a pair of intro-scan buttons, and a search button that doubles as a recording-mute switch.

The intro-scan buttons enable the user to preview the first few seconds of each track in either direction from the current position. Simply skipping to the previous or next track is accomplished by pressing the search button and either the fast-forward or rewind button simultaneously. Response with the calibrated Type II chrome tape was slightly better, not showing as marked a rolloff.

Dolby tracking error was greater than we like to see, particularly for Dolby C and S. Fortunately, the deviations can be largely corrected with the Play Trim control. Perhaps because of the KX's two-head design, high-frequency response rolled off somewhat earlier at the IEC 0-dB level than we usually see in a deck equipped with Dolby HX Pro-it was down 3 dB at approximately 8, 9, and 13 kHz for the ferric, chrome, and metal tapes, respectively.

That performance could be improved by manually adjusting the bias control, but at the expense of response flatness at dB, which is more important except for music that is unusually rich in high-frequency energy.

The KX's noise performance was very good and reflected the effectiveness of the Dolby S circuitry. Instead of setting the peaks at some unknown point "in the red," you can record knowing that the 0-dB marking corresponds pretty well to the overload threshold. Measurements of the KX's transport showed low, but not negligible, amounts of wow and flutter and a modest overall speed error. Highspeed winding was quick, and the deck's input and output levels were entirely normal.

Apart from the difficulty of reading the labels for the pushbutton switches behind the access panel, the KX was quite well designed and easy to operate. The only other complaint we had about the deck's operation has to do with the slightly odd grouping of the filter controls. The more usual configuration, with Dolby noise reduction selected by one control and the multiplex filter turned on or off by another, seems more logical.

Although it exhibited some low-level grunge with metal tapes, perhaps because it was unable to fully erase them before recording, it did very well with the more commonly used ferric and chrome-equivalent tapes.