For those of us who lived in the capitalist west during the Cold War, there remains a fascination to this day about the Other Side. The propaganda we were fed as kids matched theirs in describing the awful things on the other side of the wall, something that wasn’t borne out when a decade or so later in the 1990s we met people from the former communist side and found them unsurprisingly to be just like us. It’s thus still of interest to have a little peek into Eastern Bloc consumer electronics, something we have the chance of courtesy of [DiodeGoneWild], who’s fixing a 1980s Soviet cassette recorder.
The model in question is a Vesna 309, and it has some audio issues and doesn’t turn the tape. It gets a teardown, the motor is cleaned up inside, and a few capacitor and pot cleanups later it’s working again. But the interest lies as much in the machine itself as it does in the repair, as it’s instructive to compare with a Western machine of the same period.
We’re told it would have been an extremely expensive purchase for a Soviet citizen, and in some ways such as the adjustable level control it’s better-specified than many of our equivalents. It’s based upon up-to-date components for its era, but the surprise comes in how comparatively well engineered it is. A Western cassette deck mechanism would have been a much more sketchy affair than the substantial Soviet one, and its motor would have been a DC part with a simple analogue speed controller rather than the brushless 3-phase unit in the Vesna. Either we’re looking at the cassette deck for senior comrades only, or the propaganda was wrong — at least about their cassette decks. The full video is below, and if you’re hungry for more it’s not the first time we’ve peered into electronics from the eastern side of the Iron Curtain.
The icons on the “Play” and “Record” buttons are interesting!
Reminiscent of download and upload icons.
Get stuff from the tape, put stuff on the tape. But what does the button on the very right do, activate the defibrillator?
I wonder if it turns RIAA equalization on/off.
Press once to stop, press again to eject. Same as in many Japanese mechs.
Stop and eject?
“The rubber belts may have become carbon emissions.”
B^)
A good comrade always records conversation for the KGB. Is it live ? …or Memorex…..no it is Red…Tape…..
You must be have be fun in Reagan era´ś dinners …
I have a tape from the fabulous duo…Richard Nixon and Rose Mary Woods….titled Richard and Rose Hum The Oldies…..it runs 18 minutes..
While the people weren’t different…
As a 16yo, I travelled between West Germany and West Berlin on a bus, and visited East Berlin. The E German border guards were especially tight and humourless; the W. German guards in Berlin were notable by their absence.
In East Berlin I visited the premier department store (think Selfridges in London) in Alexanderplatz. Sincee couldn’t take the 5 marks back to W. Berlin, so we had to spend it. The most interesting thing was a set of postcards, yawn.
A couple of years later I met an acquaintance working for the BBC. His job was to travel around the Soviet Union to find how well the BBC was being received. He confirmed all the propaganda tales about what life was like in the Soviet Union.
The next time I crossed the wall was through it; I was surprised at how thin it was. The atmosphere, less than a week after the wall “fell” was really strange. It felt as if the whole city was in a daze, possibly like the feeling in UK France etc at the end of WW2.
TL;DR: propaganda stories were true, and “mensch ist mensch”, i.e. people are people, the whole world over.
Thanks for posting your personal experience, it was an interesting read.
That device is definitely not something normal “plebs” could hope to buy. It costed about 200-300 rubles, at a time when an average Russian monthly salary was about the same. A single cassette costed 4 rubles, for example.
Soviet production (not only electronics) was either complete crap, with extremely poor manufacturing quality if it was was consumer market – or a very well made, very good quality items intended either for the military, police (including KGB) or the political elite.
Actually these devices were made in Kiev and in Zaporizhzhia, in Ukraine.
Another problem was power supply construction.
Russian radio amateurs were known for their whining telegraphy signals (dow-di‐dow‐di-dow-dow-di-dow vs. dah‐dit-da-dit‐dah-dah-dit-dah.)
The cause were missing capacitors in the power supply, I heard.
Probably because they were unavailable at the time.
Speaking of power supplies. Some UdSSR TVs had horrible designs.
I once had the, err, ‘pleasure’ to a look inside a Junost b/w TV. What a horrible mess!
Wires everywhere and no modular concept at all. Hard to repair!
The most horrid part was the huge power supply, though.
It was full of big, archaic rectifier parts.
That being said, it wasn’t the technology itself which was poor.
It was just used in a very planless way, I think.
If the parts were arranged in a different way, they would have done better.
But the designers probably knew and had to do it that way. Education sector was rather good in UdSSR or so I heard, so it wasn’t lack of knowledge.
About production quality, how about exports? Were they of higher quality, too?
Because in former East Germany, the good quality productions were exported, while the production runs with some defects were sold to the own population.
So it happened that certain products ended up in West German stores and were sold via mail order companies (“Quelle” Versandhaus).
Without being advertised as GDR productions, of course. The companies rather sold them under their own labels (we W Germans didn’t had have mind if we had been told the truth, I think).
That way, the GDR citizens sometimes got their own products back via “Westpakete”.
So, it was CRAP (in accordance with you) and this crap was made in Kiev. Nice….
“It’s based upon up-to-date components for its era, but the surprise comes in how comparatively well engineered it is.
A Western cassette deck mechanism would have been a much more sketchy affair than the substantial Soviet one, and its motor would have been a DC part with a simple analogue speed controller rather than the brushless 3-phase unit in the Vesna.”
I guess it must be really surprising to readers from north american continent (hackaday’s main audience?).
But generally speaking, it wasn’t too seldom that mechanical parts were of reasonable quality in Europe of the 70s/80s, either.
The appliances were probably made using standard components, still and there was no “market” for low‐quality parts as there was in north america.
That’s also true for former East Germany, I think. There were not enough resources to manufacture bad quality products on purpose.
I mean, just look at cassette tape recorders from both Germanies of the time.
They were quite heavy and bulky, still and had DIN connectors for microphone and loudspeakers ‐ rather than RCA/Cinch.
Parts of the recorders, like buttons and so on were made of aluminium etc.
(It was also possible to buy modern/lightweight radio casette recorders with a handle, of course.
Such models were more fragile and mostly made of plastic.
Old Quelle catalogs give an good impression, I believe.)
That being said, the mechanical parts of this recorder here are quite good.
The electro motor is also a higher end model. Ours were usually a bit smaller, I think.
I would assume that most US electronics purchased in the 1980’s would have been made in Japan, Hong Kong or Taiwan, or used components made there.
That would make sense. Though Japan usually had higher quality standards, I believe.
The products made by Sharp had a good quality, for example, I remember.
Maybe these countries produced lower quality products specifically with US market in mind? To satisfy market demands?
At least to Japan, the US had been quite a notable market for exports or so I heard.
It served as sort of an role model to anything western.
Not more important than their own market, though, maybe. But notable never-the‐less.
Old Europe by contrast wasn’t that important to them, it seemed. Speaking under correction, of course.
VESNA-309 was not really popular cassette player. VESNA-202 (ВЕСНА-202) vas like a maintream.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUEOcTakCqU
I have fixed like 100 of them back in 80s
So where is the little radio that transmits everything you play and record back to the KGB?
it’s in the US embassy, why do you ask?
The Theremin Antenna in The Thing?
This one goes to 11 ! Also, prices were printed on the product’s case…
I had as a teen one of this brushless motors from soviet cassette players. Came from unit that I’ve attempted to save and due lack of experienca ultimately failed. I remember that motor had so much torque i had to use pliers to held shaft to stop it from turning
I had one, and in addition to playing lots of music through it, until Chinese cassette players appeared, I loaded tons and tons of tapes from it into my ZX Spectrum. That tape counter sure came in handy. However each tape was recorded slightly differently and to load them I constantly had to adjust head alignment, until one day the brass threads on it gave up, and the whole thing became useless.
That this machine seems to be a quality build, doesn’t say anything about other machines. Looking back at the western equipment that I’ve disassembled over the past decades my experience is that the old stuff is, big, heavy and well build but keep in mind that it was expensive. Over the years things become cheaper, better engineered to cost less etc. And cost is for most people the most important factor, after all a perfect device you can’t afford isn’t useful is it?
Also keep in mind that the crappy cassette recorders of horrible quality are most likely already discarded. The expensive and quality stuff always has a better chance to survive. It creates the bias of “they don’t build ‘m like that any more”. But even back then they’ve made crap too, but we don’t have it any more to see it.
+1
Then there are other quality factors, too.
Like wobble, warble and wow and flutter.
Audio cassettes were meant to be portable and cheap, like VHS.
The recorders and players thus may suffer from several design flaws of the medium.
Especially in SSTV, slow scan television, cassette quality and recorder quality was (is) important.
Otherwise, the picture would be distorted or skewed, at worst.
Here’s an YT clip about SSTV that I saw by coincidence. It shows the cassette as a medium.
The cassette can be seen at 5:40 minute marking.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaVMrGkLWk4
For things like this, a micro cassette (pocket voice recorder etc) or a real (reel) tape machine might be the better alternative.
I forgot to mention the datasette, the master of disaster.
If someone truely wants to see how troublesome the cassette was, tinkering with datasette technology is a good start.
There’s a reason why 1200 Baud FSK was so popular or why each data block had been stored multiple times in a row (3x often).
It was all because of the unreliability of the cassette medium.
The data stream wasn’t being allowed to be either too slow or too fast.
Otherwise, the cassette was interferring. Datasette was like shortwave.
It was a narrow, limited medium that couldn’t be fully trusted.
That’s why some people used the VHS cassette to record audio; but not on the linear mono track!
No, it was on the vertical helical track, which carried the video and stereo audio and which was highly stable.
Some people even went so far to use VHS as a streamer medium,
by storing encoded digital information in form of visual patterns.
Some cassette players made in USSR had Made in Japan motors. I used to harverst them from broken players.
“Propaganda” that we have been fed?? Sorry?
Jenny, it’s appalling to read that you are suggesting that Western allies have fed their population “propaganda” and, by extension, that our democracies have resorted to the fascist tricks that the Russian and Soviet states have been doing since 1917.
The next time you pick up something to read, make sure it’s a history book – or a newspaper, for that matter. Its 2024, and the Russian Federation’s ambitions are as clear as daylight to anyone following their atrocities in Ukraine.
Get your facts straight, and know how to speak up against fascism and the Axis of Evil. Slava Ukraini! #standforukraine 🇺🇸🇪🇺 ❤️ 🇺🇦
Are you seriously saying that democracies *haven’t* used propaganda? Like, with a straight face and everything?
In that case, I’ve got a bridge to sell you…
I have difficulty deciding if the comment is intended to be sarcasm.
Me too. It almost reads like sarcasm, but then there’s the end that seems far too serious.
I thought this was HACKADAY, not PROPALLDAY?
Axis of evil? Where is it? Iraq? Afghanistan? Libya? You sure destroyed a lot of countries and you are still searching for it.
It’s in the CMB!
Conflating Russia and the USSR is one result of western propaganda.
This was my first cassette recorder, bought in Moscow in GUM (Glavnyj Universalnyj Magazin, Main Department Store) on Red Square. Although monophonic, it wasn’t bad at all, having bass and treble adjustment, tape type selector and recording level adjustment. God only knows, how hard those 170 rubles were earned and saved to buy it…
£1 in today’s money too!