Zenith VR9760

[trinescope]

I found one of these locally a few weeks ago. I only had two Beta tapes here, so my testing was limited. The deck seems to record and play back well, but the other prerecorded tape has problems. The tracking control has to be set to one end of its range and the playback is still noisy and goes really bad every now and then in what seems like every revolution of the cassette hub. The sound while playing this tape remains rock solid. Is this just possibly a problem with this one tape? Maybe I should look for more tapes to try out.

When playing back a tape recorded on this machine the picture is steady, even on an old tube type TV, which I remember usually didn't like VCR signals; they would usually have a bend in the top of the screen. Not so with this one.