Mods

Recently I decided I was going to mod my WS-X1. These are my findings and ideas.

Capstan motor on/off switches

The motors in both tape decks can be modded to allow them to be turned off when not in use. The motors are on all the time when the WS-X1 is switched on and this will cause unnecessary wear and tear.

Adding on off switches is easy all you need to do is cut the red wire going to the motor and add an spst switch which will toggle power to the motor on and off.

There are four wires going to the motor. The red one is the power. Cut it and then solder each end to the switch. Test it. Then drill a hole in the casing of the WS-X1 to hold the switch.

This can be done on both motors.

Post fader tape outputs

The WS-X1 has 6 tape outputs on phono sockets at the back of the WS-X1. These outputs take signal straight from the tape heads thus giving you a raw output of the tracks on the tape for mixing with another mixer or backing up to computer or another tape machine.

I wanted to get outputs of the mixer when mixing. For example I am doing a mix and I want to record the individual channels rather than just a stereo mix of the whole mix. This way I can use my computer for more precise edits and mixing.

The tape outputs don’t work for this because they take the signal straight from the tape and not from the mixer.

The solution is to take a signal feed form the faders and wire it to ethier the original tape output phonos or add new jacks to the WS-X1. This would create post fader direct outputs of each channel.

Having looked at the WS-X1’s schematics and pcb’s i think this is a relatively easy mod but I am yet to do it. The only problem is the tape out phono sockets are pcb mounted, meaning they are stuck to the pcb board and it makes cutting the signal from the original tape outputs harder.

More info after I start working on it.

On board reverb external output

Personally I love the reverb on the WS-X1 so much! I want to use it on it’s own and also get a dedicated output for it.

This would work in combination with my post fader tape outputs mod and would allow me to record the reverb output along with my 6 tape channels. This would give me more flexibility mixing in the computer.

Adding the output should be as easy as taking signal from the reverb pcb board output and wiring it to a jack socket mounted on the back of the WS-X1.