Topic: Sony D8 won't play!

[jlykos]

I taped the Allman Brothers and Derek last night, brought my tapes home, and they played fine on my D8.  This morning, I go to listen to them and the D8 is reading all the tapes as blank and won't play the music on them.  The tape is moving properly in the D8, but sound does not come out.  It is also loading funky sometimes; the tape will load, the D8 will shut off briefly, and then turn back on to re-load the tape.  Sometimes it loads properly, sometimes not.  This is all this morning; the deck worked fine just 12 hours ago.

Can anybody offer any assistance with this?

[drewloo]

Wonder if the tape got flipped over somehow & it's trying to read the back of the tape? 

[jlykos]

Problem is that it does this with every tape I put into it.  I cleaned the heads and now it won't even load any tape properly.  I am hesitant to even send it in for servicing because of the cost involved vs. the purchase of an iRiver or a MicroTrack.

[blackmikito]

I had a D8 that had similar problems. It would record fine, but when trying to playback the heads obviously wouldn't read the tape.
On top of which, when trying to fast-forward, the unit would only go a few seconds before reading "Blank".

As far as I researched, it's usually due to the head wearing out. That, and the incompatibility with certain brands and/or lengths of dat tape.

On the old Dat heads faq I seem to remember reading that one must be careful with playing back tapes in a machine that starts doing that because it may accidentally erase the tape.