Here’s something interesting I’ve been fiddling with recently. A friend of mine asked me to refurbish his old tape deck, an old ITT Schaub-Lorenz SL58 Super. He wanted to record onto and then off again, capturing the compression, noise and warmth that only tape can bring to the table. I think that most of us pre-90’s oldies can remember playing games with such fun tape decks as kids. Be it radio time or story telling, we all recognised the limitless potential of a tape recorder, so why now are these fantastic devices gathering dust around at your grannies or at the back of a cupboard? I blame “the” digital myself.
After cleaning out the dust and spiders that had set up home inside. I dropped in a small filter circuit to replace the three-wire electret microphone capsule, allowing for a direct line in. This was just as well because the capsule snapped off shortly after starting (oops). I then rewired the output through a switched jack plug giving the option to use the inbuilt speaker or the line out. Both in/out routes had to be put through 3.5 mm sockets due to the limited space available inside the deck. I had a quick jam with it and was quite pleased with the hissing, popping and general squashing of whatever I hammered into it. Success!
I can’t wait to hear what Keith comes up with to put it to use!
Check out his website and band here:
http://www.allwiredup.ie/allwiredup/all_wired_up/all_wired_up.html
http://sleepthieves.wordpress.com/
Pictures of the job below.
Ditch that digital and reuse your analogue!
Gareth W. Young 
I have just got one of these cheap from the flea market and the scope shows audio on the 5 pin socket at the back. It is a switched socket as well so there was no need for all that work you did.
Basically it cuts out the internal microphone and allows recording from a record player and line out to an external amplifier.
Mine works fine now that I have removed a foreign object from within.
That’s what I thought, but I didn’t investigate any further. Any chance of a pin layout diagram to add to this page?
Looking at the socket on the back the ground pin is top center.
External microphone is bottom left and gram input is bottom right.
Top left is line in and top right is line out.
If you look into the socket there is a switch actuator so adding the insert of a plug will leave the internal microphone in circuit.
The five pin connector at the back is pinned out so that ground is at the top.
The line pins are top left line in and top right line out.
Line in takes the place of the internal microphone when the plug is inserted.