Hello, and welcome back to 8-Bit Keys.
In this episode, I want to show you this crazy Caio KX-101 boombox / keyboard hybrid.
I think this thing was made in 1986, although I have not been able to confirm that yet.
I think it may be one of the craziest contraptions that Casio has ever produced.
Now, this thing is not 100% working.
The main problem is the cassette deck.
I think the belt is broken, but it may have other issues as well.
There's also some problems with the amplifier, there's weird, bizarre, random noises and
stuff that come from it.
And, I think some of the issue is with some of the slider controls are not making good
contact anymore and need to be cleaned.
But, despite that, before I try to repair this thing, I want to go ahead and try to
review all of the things that are currently working.
And, the reason is, because I have read online some horror stories about how difficult these
things are to take apart and work on.
And so, what I'm afraid of is that once I take it apart, I may end up making the thing
worse, or maybe not even get it put back together properly.
So, I want you to at least be able to see the stuff that works.
So, let's get right into it!
As far as boomboxes go, the KX-101 may have more actual buttons than any other boombox
ever made.
And to be honest, I'm not going to go over each and every button because I think this
video would be 3 hours long if I did.
This thing is also rather heavy for a boombox of this class.
As you can see it weighs in at a little over 13 pounds, 3 ounces.
For you guys in the rest of the world that use the far more logical metric system, thats
about 5.99, or essentially 6 kilograms.
And that's without all of those heavy D cell batteries in there.
Let's turn this thing around.
I want to show you the speakers.
By the way, it does just get power form the standard 2 prong AC cord, which was common
with boomboxes in the 80s.
However, this is different from the figure-8 style cords that are more common on electronics
today.
The speakers are connected by these little wires.
And then, you can press the release button here and the speakers will just lift right
off.
Now, what the purpose of this is, I have no idea.
But if you wanted, you could use longer cables like these and put the speakers wherever you
want.
So, for example, if you wanted to arrange the thing like this, I guess you could.
Next I'll draw your attention to the function switch.
It has 4 main modes of operation, Keyboard, tape player, radio, and line input.
Please ignore the dirty switch.
I really haven't cleaned this thing up yet.
I figured I'd do that when I take it apart.
And, of course, here's the main power switch over here.
And you'll notice there's kind of a delay before it comes to life.
So, in keyboard mode, it works pretty much like you'd expect.
I'll come back to this later.
I'll try moving it over to radio.
Yeah, so the radio works fine, and I seems to be decently clear.
So, let's try the cassette tape mode.
I'm going to use one of Anders Jensen's tapes, since he is the one that donated this
crazy thing to me.
But when I press play… all you hear is this humming of a motor.
And that's it.
Doesn't seem to matter if it is play, fast forward, or rewind.
Same story.
I suspect the belt is broken.
Literally nothing is moving in here.
It also has a good amount of inputs and outputs.
Including stereo line out, line in, and microphone inputs.
Apparently this thing has some sing-along type features too.
Oh, and I also want to show you the battery compartment.
So it actually takes 8 D-cell batteries, which would add quite a bit more weight to this
thing.
But what's even more interesting Isi what is hiding over here.
I'll have to use a screwdriver to take this panel off.
And look at that.
It's a Casio RAM pack slot.
Good luck finding one of those.
They do show up on eBay from time to time.
This one recently showed up, but it's in France and I wouldn't have time to wait
for it since I've already started filming this video.
But this is literally the only one on eBay and once it's gone, there probably won't
be another for a while.
So, the purpose of the RAM card is so that you could compose some music and then save
it digitally to the RAM card and then, you know, play it back later.
Well, interestingly enough, another option besides the RAM card would be to save the
music to a cassette tape.
Now, you might think that what I'm talking about is just saving the analog sound data
to a cassette tape so you could play it back in your walkman or your car stereo or something
like that.
But, that's not actually what it does.
In fact, ironically, the best I can tell, this unit can't actually do that.
But, what it can do is it can save digital information to a cassette tape with your musical
composition much in the same way that, say, an old Commodore, Apple, or Atari might have
saved digital information to a cassette around that same time period.
But, for all the good it does me because my cassette drive isn't working.
OK, so I do want to demonstrate the keyboard some, so I'll plug in some wires to the
line output to record from.
But I want to draw your attention to another problem.
If you take a listen to this recording I'm making, you'll hear random weird noises.
These noises are audible both from the main speakers and from the line output.
So, there's no way to get a clean recording from this, but hopefully it won't be too
terrible.
I'd also like to mention that the keys on this thing are really small, similar to this
Casio SA-9 that I recently reviewed.
Although the boombox actually has ad additional 5 keys.
However, the sounds this thing makes are far more primitive and more inline with the old
Casio PT series keyboards that produce cheap squarewaves.
In fact, the closest actual match in sound and features would be the Casio PT-30, which
I don't currently have.
However, again the boombox has a few additional keys.
So, let's try out the keyboard.
The first thing I want to show you is how the the notes alternate from left to right
when you play.
And just in case you couldn't hear that, take a look at the recording here in audacity.
As you can see, it has 4-voice polyphony.
Now, I wanted to play some songs for you, but the keys are so ridiculously small, that
it is nearly impossible to play anything complicated on this.
My fingers keep bumping into each other and finding the right key by feel alone is really
tough.
It's really frustrating.
You're far better off trying to play simple songs like chopsticks……
Or this.
Over here on the left it has these little chord buttons, similar the Casio PT series,
They can only make one sound, which is an organ.
If you hold down the key, you can change to different types of chords.
But the keys are also so ridiculously small they are hard to use.
You can change instruments by pressing the tone button, and then selecting one of the
9 instruments that are listed above the black keys… well, they aren't black on this
keyboard, but you know what I mean.
Of course, none of these instruments sound particularly good.
This is the Piano 3.
This is the Harpsichord.
This is Clarinet.
This is Horn.
Here's Flute.
And last, this is Mellow.
But one problem with all of these instruments is they are too high pitched.
Fortunately, there is a transpose option and you can go down 12 half steps, or basically
an entire octave.
I've found the keyboard sounds much better moving it down like this.
This is a much more reasonable range of notes.
Using this, the Horn sounds kind of like a sawtooth wave of some kind.
Another neat feature is the unison button.
What this does is makes the keyboard monophonic but uses all 4 voices in a slightly detuned
way, giving a neat sound.
So here's the clarinet again.
That actually sounds pretty cool.
Here's the Organ.
And the Piano.
And the Harpsichord.
OK, so now we've reached the part I've been secretly dreading, which is, I'm going
to see if I can take this thing apart and hopefully fix it.
Fortunately, I found a few tips online for disassembly.
And I learned that it is necessary to pop off all of these switches on the front panel
first.
And some of these aren't too happy about coming off, like this one.
However, other ones seem to come off with little to no issue.
Unfortunately, this main function switch was the toughest to get off.
And then this happened.
Lovely.
Well, I'm not off to a great start, I can see.
I turned my attention to some of these other little rocker type switches.
And eventually back to this stubborn one.
Eventually it did come off.
And, of course, I have a whole bunch to do on the other side over here.
Once that's all done, the next thing to do is turn it over and unscrew all of the
screws in the back.
I had already noticed that this power supply looked like it might be a removable piece.
So once I was done with these four screws I tried to pull it out.
And sure enough, it does come out as a single unit.
I suppose this was handy for fitting it with different power supplies for different regions.
It connects right here with these little pins.
And this thing is surprisingly heavy.
So here goes nothing….
Wow.
I'd better remove this ground wire.
I'm actually going to put the screw back so I don't lose it.
This is one device I'll need to be super careful about remembering where things go.
Now let's see if these ribbons will disconnect.
Thank God, they do.
Holy cow manure.
This thing is way overcomplicated.
It's downright scary.
I'll be honest I'm tempted to close it back up right now and just say forget it.
OK, so I need to remove this tape mechanism.
And it looks like I might be able to remove it.
But, I think I'm going to start by removing the tape heads.
The main reason being Is that the wires are soldered in somewhere over here, and I think
it'd be easier just to unscrew them.
So that's what I'm going to do.
Next I'm going unscrew the cassette mechanism.
I'm not 100% convinced I can remove the mechanism without removing the any of the
boards, but the chances look good, so I'm going to go for it.
It did require some careful maneuvering, but I was successful.
OK, so now that I finally get a closer look at the cassette mechanism, I realize the belt
is not broken, but it has slipped off of its pulleys.
Naturally, I can put the belt back on, but the first question that comes to mind is WHY
did it slip off and will it happen again?
Well, I did manage to re-attach the belt, but if I had any hope of seeing this thing
in motion, I needed to re-attach it to the rest of the system.
So that's exactly what I did.
I also reinstalled the power supply so that I could power this thing on.
So I powered the unit on, then I moved the selector switch to cassette mode.
And, of course tried pressing play.
Well, something happened.
The little capstan is spinning, but nothing else.
I thought maybe I should put a cassette in there, one I don't care about of course.
So, when I play the tape, the capstan does pull the tape along, but the other reel is
not spinning to collect the tape.
This will obviously never work.
Ok guys.
The moment of truth has arrived.
So, here's the thing.
This tape mechanism is ridiculously complicated.
It's not even mechanical in nature.
This thing's got a lot of electronic parts.
It's got sensors and at least 4 or 5 little solenoids all through it.
And you can't actually force this thing into say, fast forward, rewind, play or anything
like that because it all has to receive commands from this ribbon cable here.
Now, I have spent the last several hours poking around at this thing and trying to figure
out what's wrong with it.
And from a mechanical perspective, once I put the belt back on, I can't find anything
wrong.
Yet, at the same time, one of the things that it does is that the little pinch wheel here
actually does pull the tape but neither one of these little gears that are supposed to
you know, wind the tape in, are working in either direction.
And so, again, I don't know if it's a solenoid problem, or it could even be an electrical
problem here on this board.
In fact, there's an entire daughter board under here for controlling the cassette drive.
So the bottom line is, I'm sure if I wanted to devote the next year of my life, I could
probably track down and fix this problem.
But ultimately, I just don't want to.
You know, that's something that everybody has got to come to terms with.
At some point when you're repairing a project you've got to be able to draw a line and
say I'm going to go this far and no further.
And this is as far as I'm going to go with this unit.
I'm just not going to spend the next year repairing it.
So, what I am going to do is I'm going to put it back together and there's actually
a slim chance that it may actually work now that the belt is back on.
Because there's a few little sensors and there's even a ground wire that connects
under there, and a few other things that I don't know, maybe when it's all put back
together, maybe it will work.
I don't know.
Let's found out.
After 2 hours of careful re-assembly I managed to get it all back together again and even
managed to superglue that piece of the function switch back on.
Unfortunately, the cassette drive still doesn't work.
However, I figured if nothing else I could at least fix this peeling off label, right?
I thought what I'd do is use some alcohol to clean off the old adhesive just on this
part that is peeling off, then apply some new adhesive and stick it back down.
Well, one thing I realized is that this label was barely hanging on at all, so I just pulled
it the rest of the way off.
Then I cleaned the remaining adhesive off of the label.
My plan was now to mask off the area around this and use spray adhesive.
Unfortunately, my wife used all of my good adhesive on one of her craft projects and
bought me this new adhesive to replace it.
It was not tacky at all, just like spraying water actually.
I thought maybe if I put some weight on top of it and let it dry, maybe that would help.
Well, a few hours later, I checked it out and it wasn't even adhered in anyway at
all.
So, yeah..
I'm going to chunk that spray adhesive she bought me.
I guess I'll resort to a simpler method and just use double-sided tape.
I'll coat the entire area, and then trim the excess away with a knife.
And that actually seems to work really well.
However, I'm sort of disappointed that I got some alcohol on the front of the label
and it almost immediately took off the markings for the serial number and voltage.
So I used my label printer and made a new serial number badge.
It's the same number as before, as I wanted to preserve the number for this unit.
And so here we go.
Looks like I got it a little crooked, but the original number was too so I guess I won't
worry about it.
And of course, here's the voltage label.
Well, this doesn't look perfect but it is better than it was a few minutes ago.
OK guys, well I guess that about wraps it up.
I'm sorry this episode was just a little bit anticlimactic, since I wasn't able to
repair it.
But, you know, I think it's important to show the failures along with the successes
when it comes to doing repair work or restoration work because things don't always go to and
that's just the reality of it.
The silver lining is, at least I was able to get it all back together without damaging
anything internally.
So I didn't make the thing any worse off than it was before.
So, anyway at least you did get to see a little demonstration of how it works.
All righty, well I do have some great content planned for next month.
And I am going to try do at least one episode a month for this channel, so stick around
for March's episode, I think you'll find it more entertaining.
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