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.

[trinescope]

I'm updating this in case anyone stumbles across this thread in a search. This machine has/had two problems: First, the control/audio head assembly was out of alignment causing the machine to act like a tracking control that didn't have enough range. Second problem is the capstan and pinch roller, the capstan has a visible wear pattern where the tape rides and it is causing wrinkling of the tape as it exits the capstan. This is causing distortion of the FM waveform picked up by the video head and it occurs at the same rate as the disturbances seen on the TV. I'm sure the solution is to find a good capstan without the wear in the center and get the tape deformation to stop.