Craig B
Re:trophile
Looking at the state of those headshell leads, it is obvious that the barn environment (or perhaps her friend's basement or shed before that?) has taken its toll.
If you do decide to attempt correction of the intermittent output from the record deck, I suggest the following:
- Replace the headshell wires with new (a simple task using tweezers, and the wires don't have to be expensive).
- While the headshell leads are off, use meths on a cotton swab to clean the cartridge and headshell pins, plus the headshell to tonearm signal contacts.
- Using the same meths on a cotton swab method, thoroughly clean the tonearm cable RCA plugs and rings, as well the rings of the phono input sockets round back of the NAD. You may even want to sparingly use Peek or Autosol polish on these bits of metal as they are likely to be somewhat corroded by now (although they often come up clean and shiny with a bit of metal polish). A pipe cleaner is ideal for cleaning inside the RCA plug rings and the none exposed length of pin within.
- Make certain that all headshell lead clips fit good and tight, as well the rings round the RCA plugs (a gentle squeeze here will do, although take heed of the note below wrt tightening headshell lead clips).
P.S. It is possible that extreme high contact resistance in the cartridge to tonearm/tonearm to amp path is causing the treble level to be down on one channel vs the other. As such, with no other sources available with which to test further, I'd reserve judgement on the health of the speakers until such time as the deck is sorted. A simple test here is to reverse the speaker cables L to R at the amp end to determine whether the treble problem changes sides or no (i.e. problem changing sides equals loudspeaker issue, not changing sides equals issue upstream).
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