Hi all.

I have the Symphony stereo with the tape player in my Superb - which I have been using to play all my old tapes that I don't have or can't get on cd. Today though, I put in a tape and couldn't hear it. Turned the volume to max and all I could hear was what sounded like music recorded underwater!

I played the tape on another tape deck I have and the same thing happened, so I tried another tape that works fine and this did the same.

I dug out an old tape headcleaner and ran it through the home system and the tape (that had already played ok) now sounded like new. So I tried the headcleaner in the car steroeo but no joy:(

It seems that the tape had caused all the problems so that's now binned, but any idea how I can sort out the in car stereo, as I really would like to carry on playing my tapes!!

What's a tape? Just kidding!

The "underwater sound" sounds like what you hear when a tape gets chewed (from what I can remember about tapes, ha-ha). Did you check the cassette tape itself and did it look like it had been "chewed"? From experience I know when tape players get old they sometimes start to fail and just chew whatever tape you throw at them. I guess something in the mechanism fails and the tape is no longer held straight so it gets twisted which then damages the tape. Doesn't sound like dirty heads to me that a head-cleaner would fix, but maybe your tapes got chewed in another player. From what you've said, it's possible your car stereo chewed the first tape, and then when you played it in your home player, the chewed tape would sound like it was underwater. I don't know a lot about this though, so maybe I'm WAY off.

If it were me, I'd test a tape you're not too bothered about losing (use a copied tape) and test your various tape players to see if they chew tapes. If your car stereo is at fault, or you simply can't figure out WHAT is wrong, I suppose you could either look into getting it repaired, or try to buy an aftermarket unit with a tape player (if they still make them) and if not another option would be to buy a headunit with an AUX in port, so you could then plug a portable tape player into your car stereo and still enjoy your tapes.

Hope you get it sorted.

thanks for the suggestion but the tapes not chewed. I spooled it on and back but no signs of chewing. I wonder if somehow it's magnetised the heads in the player. I ran a de-magnitiser tape through it but no luck so perhaps i'm way off base too!

Anyone out there that can help?

Have you run the tape head cleaner and a de-magnetiser through the Symphony in both directions? It's a reversing system so worth checking just in case and, by reversing it you might just unjam something!