A couple of weeks ago I bought an old Walkman, because I felt like listening to some tapes again; something that I hadn't done in at least 25 years. This set me on a path to look a bit more into old Hi-Fi equipment. Not old as in from the 70s and 80s, but older than what we have today, which is essentially just Bluetooth or Wifi speakers and not much else (unless you want to go high end). Something that can still play tapes and CDs (I haven't owned a proper CD player in probably two decades, either), doesn't take up too much space, looks nice and isn't too expensive. And so I bought this. This is the JVC UX-P3R from 2001. I wish I could find the original product page from the JVC homepage from back then, but I've had no luck. It seems to be gone forever. I bought this because I like the early 2000s design, it has a CD player and a tape deck, and it's small and light. Exactly what I was looking for. I got it from eBay for 27 Euros including shipping, and it was described as fully tested and working. Which turned out to be a very optimistic description of the actual condition. The belt in the tape drive had disintegrated, but that was something I had expected from a 25 year old drive and I was pretty sure that the seller hadn't tested this, because who still plays tapes these days. You know, apart from some weird people who also still write blogs... What I didn't expect though was what I saw after I opened the device. First, it was incredibly dusty. But then there was this: There was a huge crack in the board near the speaker terminals. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that this device was maybe not very thoroughly tested, because that should have been noticed. Though to be fair, this could have also happened in transit. The remote was also missing, even though it was included in the eBay auction. The seller was very nice though when I got in touch with him. He gave me a 50% discount on the price, and he also sent me the remote in the post. Which turned out to be just as dirty, full of crusty battery acid from a leaked battery, and before handing it over the postman charged me three Euros because the guy had bought the wrong postage stamp... the usual eBay madness. The stereo cleaned up well though, and after a disassembly and a good clean the remote worked, too, and had not taken any damage from the leaked battery. I put a new belt into the tape drive and stabilized the crack in the board with some super glue and patched the broken solder traces with wires and a few solder bridges. Thankfully the crack was in the corner and there were just a handful of broken traces, so that was an easy fix. My biggest worry was that the CD player would refuse to play any CDs, because that's hard to fix if it can be fixed at all, but it turned out to be working fine. Overall, after cleaning and repairing it, the stereo turned out really nice. It didn't come with any speakers, which is fine because I already have a good pair of living room speakers which I could connect it to. It was also really easy to open and take apart and get to all the components. Techmoan recently made a video in which he tried to repair a Sony micro Hi-Fi from the same era, which turned out to be a complete disaster. But this one was well put together and great to work on. I don't know if this is true for all JVC devices, but it is for this. One thing I want to mention if you're thinking about buying some vintage (or just older) Hi-Fi gear: Do some research before you buy and check if you can find not only the user manual available online, but also the service manual. For this device I found both, and the service manual is really detailed and comprehensive and was really helpful for the repair. It contains parts lists, schematics, block diagrams, board layouts and even diagrams about what the output of the CD player's laser unit should look like on an oscilloscope. So when the CD player inevitably fails at some point (hopefully not soon), I can go in and see what's wrong and maybe even adjust some things to get it working again. And now, with the stereo fully working, I can finally do what someone on Mastodon suggested in a response to my Walkman post: Record some mixtapes to listen to on the go.