Fellow KZfaqr databits made a video a few years ago entitled Optimus DCC DCT-2000 Digital Compact Cassette Deck Restored - Philips Made. In it, he shows which boards need to be pulled and what value capacitors you need to get. He also had to replace the pinch roller. There are no service manuals for this online, but any of the DCC decks from this era will need to have this servicing done eventually.

Thanks for posting! Here's some more interesting information about DCC: 7:27 The tape is so dark because it's like video tape, with really high density. Each head records a binary signal at about 96kHz and there are 8 heads for audio, plus one head for auxiliary information which works at a much lower rate (12kHz). If you would play a DCC tape on an analog recorder it kinda sounds like white noise. If you would have gotten your DCC recorder to work, you could have put a piece of tape on one of the holes to pretend that it's an analog cassette, to make that audible. 10:29 The DCT-2000 was the first "OEM" DCC recorder and it was produced at the same time as the first DCC recorders by Philips and many other manufacturers as far as I know. Most of the other manufacturers just used the entire schematic of the first Philips DCC recorder, the DCC-900, and put their own enclosure around it, but Tandy made their own recorder in cooperation with Philips. Philips provided the plugin boards which have the same DCC chips as the DCC-900. Unfortunately there is no service manual or schematic for the DCT-2000 (only a parts list and an exploded view), and there are no datasheets for the chips of the first-generation recorders, but there are plenty of datasheets for other recorders and there's enough information about the chips that makes it obvious how they work. 16:28 David Rogers (the guy who wrote the letter to the magazine) is the guy who ran the DCC-L email discussion list in the 1990s. Alas, it no longer exists and I don't know what happened to him. I myself was an active member of the DCC-L and I wrote the DCC-FAQ in 1996 just before the demise of DCC. It's still online (xs4all.goudsm.it/dcc-faq.html) but I don't maintain it anymore so it's full of dead links and outdated information. I also wrote most of the Wikipedia page about Digital Compact Cassette (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Compact_Cassette), and I update it a few times per year with new information. I also recently set up a Github repo at digitalcompactcassette.github.io with service manuals, datasheets and other information that I've found elsewhere online. Dr. DCC is a friend of mine, we're both Dutch guys living in Southern California who like DCC. He runs the DCC museum and he's been in contact with some people from the industry lately. We've uncovered a lot of information about DCC that wasn't known before; for example Philips apparently made it mandatory to store data on prerecorded DCC's that can be shown on a TV screen with an "ITTS" decoder. Those decoders never went into production but he has a pre-production version that actually works. They show a couple of pages of 40 lines of 21 characters of text and ("teletext") graphics. We have plans to reverse-engineer the ITTS box to see if we can build our own. I also have some other plans to expand the capabilities of other DCC recorders but they're still a secret because I don't want to create false expectations. I hope you'll eventually try to actually get the DCT-2000 repaired. Again, thanks for posting!

Well, I guess you could say "This Optimus is definitely past its Prime!"

After having a rough day I need my dosage of VWestlife videos to calm me down a little bit.

Are you going to recap the boards?

My Optimus DCC deck's serial number is (no joke) 010101. It also suffers from bad caps, but it did briefly play a digital tape in my video. Maybe one of these days I'll get around to replacing the bad capacitors. When it was new, it was a great deck. Like you said, the transport controls are responsive, the auto-reverse is quick, and the audio from a digital tape was near CD quality.

You didn't smell the cassette.... Is it me or does anyone else like to smell a newly opened piece of media or tech..... Just me? Ah. I'll get my coat....

I found a DCC cassette in the trash once (there was no deck with it unfortunately) but I actually tried spoiling the tape in to a regular cassette and played it to hear what that would sound like, and it just sounded like FM radio static.

What put me off buying DCC was the size of the decks. Even with the CD tray loading method, they stood so tall. I went for minidisc in 1998 which was a prettier sight!

Cassette is back. I have brick-boxes of unopened TDK tape to burn thru now...

How can you tell if a tape is Dolby encoded without looking at the packaging? Just listen and judge whether the highs are too loud?

Hopefully you can get it working again, it might be a fun project. Even though you only have 1 DCC tape, it would still be a fantastic deck to play and record regular tapes in. I'm not sure about the tray-loading mechanism though; how easy is it to clean the heads without opening it up every time?

Is it possible the tape playback head is loose ?

databits has one of these Optimus decks that he reveiwed on his channel and you are correct. the capacitors go bad on these. he had to replace all the electrolytics before it would work again.

Hello vwestlife, I would like to use one of your videos to demonstrate the generation loss from KZfaq's video compressor. Is that alright with you?

I think, the DCC tape would sound like a dial modem

At first glance on the plug in card with the SMD capacitors I could already tell they were leaky from the corrosion on the components around the capacitors.

did you try hooking up to the headphone output in the front? It sounds like a cold solder joint on the output jack.

Why does your PC show the update notification in red? Did you change the color or is it infected with malware trying to pull one off?

Have you see the video from databits

The guy on that DDC looks like Kevin Bacon

I found a portable DCC player at the flea market last year. The belt didn't survive, though.

Minidisc was quite successful in Europe and Japan I believe. And I did see Minidisc in stores and people using players a few times in the UK, but I never ever saw DCC.

How much do non working DCC decks get on Ebay? Might be a way to get some money back if you don't fancy recapping...

Have you tried swabbing the read heads with IPA?

I wanted the DCC rather than the MiniDisc, because the DCC disappeared from the shops so quickly.

Did you try the headphone plug?

Would love to see a video on new release cassettes! From my own findings some sounds amazing, for example the version of the Awesome Mix Vol. 2 that was released earlier this year sounded very good, even better than some Dolby HX Pro tapes that I have!

Very interesting concept that never took off.

I have heard of DCC but never had a player or any tapes myself. but I collect and use Minidiscs.

This is a very interesting DCC tape deck. In the 90's i recorded music off radio onto cheap cassette tapes as i was a kid and didn't have money to buy retail CD's. I might get that Twenty One Pilots cassette cause its a new release on cassette and its a good album.

Time to break out the trusty old Hakko!

did you take it back for refund? at least you can do that from a shop?

DCC in the End with problems through out it's history shame It had a short life

John Hiatt - Great Album!

Aw567Power house Philips ke bare Mai batayeye

They also made portable DCC players as well...

this feels like a case of cold solder joints...

I had a similar DCC deck in 2001 or so that also would go through all the motions but wouldn't play. I never bothered to figure out what was wrong and got rid of it. It's kind of funny because I think that mine was Philips, and I'm pretty sure that the Optimus equipment of the time was made by Panasonic/Technics.

how can you record a DCC Tape (add title)

are you planing on reviewing cheap cassette decks like a pyle or a marantz

A shame as that seems to otherwise be a rather interesting deck, would be great to see it running if you do decide to try fixing it further. Modern releases on tape are both bizarre and wonderful, cool to see and the more obscure ones make a nice thing to "collect", heh!

I'm 7 minutes in while writing this. If you were to spool the DCC tape into a regular audio cassette and play it you would hear anything between nothing and a really high pitched whistling. The carrier frequency of the digital recording is somewhere starting at around 21kHz. If you were to record on DCC tape in an analogue machine without BIAS adjustment, you would get a really loud recording because the special metal-particle tape for DCC is EXTREMELY sensitive. If you would record on it using a high end deck with BIAS adjustments you could achieve among the best recordings with it, as 20kHz+ is the range the tape needs to be good at, everything below that will obviously be no challenge. The other way around: There is a way to record a standard analogue tape with DCC coded digital music, you just need a really high quality tape. The japanese metal tapes are known to work well (TDK MA(-X(G)), Maxell MX, etc). Interestingly, the Maxell XLII (which is a ferricobalt chrome substitute tape) is also known to work well enough which states it as a tremendous chrome-type-tape.

Have you repaired it yet mate ?

That date stamp is my 4th bday :o

Still very common available second hand here in NL also blank tapes!, I always wanted a dcc walkman but there are about no batteries available for them :-(

I love your HiFi videos.

Some formats just weren't intended to be digital i suppose.

Some people tried to record digital on conventional compact cassette, beside the bad reliability, it worked well.

I wonder why they had pluggable cards? I'm guessing Tandy were assembling the players but rather than licence the chips from Philips and install them directly on the board, they just assembled the cassette player and had Philips provide the DCC circuitry on those two cards. I'm assuming they were intending to resell the same board and case as "high end" analogue casette players just without the DCC cards (and with the expansion slots unpopulated) Still, had the DCC carried on long enough for a codec upgrade (say from MP1 to MP3 or even AAC) they could have used the same board and case and just plug in the newer DCC cards with the upgraded codecs. And then years down the line, Techmoan would be ordering a spares DCC 2.0 version of this model that doesn't work and he can't fix, before ordering a spares DCC 1.0 version of the same model, finding it plays analogue tapes perfectly fine and then swapping the cards around and getting a fully working DCC 2.0 player!

Can't wait to see them releasing new betamax tapes, given the way things are going with bringing back expired formats... :D

12volts vids has a few good repair videos on this issue

Their portable decks mechanisms are far better than their component decks as they used stationary heads for autoreverse rather than the rotating head, which were less stable in azimuth like the cassette decks were.

"Plop. Plop. Fizz."

I hope you can get the player to work eventually. I think you will 😀.

Why you don't repair it? There are only defect Capacitors inside around the Head Amplifier, first change this and then we will see. First clean up the Head. Only use the SMD Capacitors from Digi-Key or Mouser etc.

Have you heard of the Channel called databits? His channel is like Techmoan.

Do a demo of the DAT format.

This is not a capacitor issue.If it is it would show with a bulge on top of it!I think its the head or somewhere very close to it! Love ur channel,though.

I was scandalised with your thumping on the machine and suggesting to take out dcc tape yo put in a regular Cassette! Made me physically nauseous

When i was a kid in the 90's i used to collect the radio shack catalogues.. I remember Optimus but don't remember this unit.. strange. I wonder what the chain of command was.. i think it was realistic, then Genexxa then Optmius.

7:30 - I don't believe that would work as the tape is digital... not analogue.

Get a hair dryer or heat gun on the boards always works on the old ps3 soldier joints

If you encounter the same problem, first you clean the head. If there is no result, you go to the head and press it down or up. There is no result. Change the pulleys. There is no result of changing the capacitors. There is no result. You press your finger on the variable resistors in the small board of the head. Or the fuse. You did not get the result of the nearest trash bin near your house, throw it inside, and comfort yourself😂

It seems like you may need to check into the tape head itself, dude......... though I certainly wouldn't rule out capacitor issues, either.

Strange

This brings back memories of working at Radio Shack at the end of 1992. They were definitely trying to sell them around Christmas of '92. I'm certain because I was laid off in January '93 and fortunately never had to work for Radio Shack again. These are not good memories. Maybe I'll try to find one of these to bash to pieces with a baseball bat.

recap all the smd components and it works again. Don't power it up until you done a recap !

Also a format dead on arrival :-)

At about 10:30 you said the magic word! The reason this deck isn't working, it's made by Philips(except for the power supply board)! Problem solved! Case closed! Philips is a brand that anyone even half-way serious about good audio gear should AVOID LIKE THE PLAGUE!

Total flop for Philips

Fail...

DCC is dead and so is Radio Shack.

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