Sanyo M3330 Inside

The Sanyo M3330 has a metal chassis, and a printed circuit board (PCB) with conventional components. For a 80s player, it has an exceptionally good build quality. There is a piece of foil-backed card (shield plate) to provide radio frequency (RF) shielding to the preamplifier circuitry. This is very important, as the Sanyo has very powerful gain.

To replace the drive belt the whole PCB would require removal, which involves desoldering the wires that are on the PCB. You can get away with removing only the battery terminal and motor wires, and leaving the playback head wires as they are.

Sanyo products are always affordable and built to a high standard and I love their old vintage cassette players. They played a very important part in the development of portable stereo cassette players, and their contribution to the development of the audio chip was revolutionary.

Cassette Motor

This motor still seems to work very well, and it has plenty more hours of life left. Cassette motor quality can vary substantially depending upon the country of manufacturing. Usually, these Japanese motors are extremely reliable and continue to operate even after all these years.

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