I bought a Tascam M3700 some years ago. now of late some of the faders let the signal sound unclean in certain positions (excuse my bad english!). so I thought about opening the console, remove the faders and see if I can clean them. I removed one today and in fact it was quite dusty inside. now I wonder if there's anything I can use to clean the contacts as well. or should I just replace those faders? thanks.

you could try contact cleaner.

Make sure you get the right one for faders/pots that has a certain amount of lubrication, or else it might only get worse and scratchier (?). If you are in Zürich, visit http://www.pusterla.ch/

Also be careful to avoid contact cleaners which dissolve plastics as you can make things even worse this way.

thanks a lot guys. I'll give the contact cleaner a try. the faders are not even scratchy the signal sounds a bit like ran through a flanger at certain positions of the fader. the master fader is especially bad around +- 0db. but the console must be around 20 years old so some of the parts might just be damaged due to their age. I'll see if I can get a new masterfader somewhere.

Alps Ks should be easy to get. Give Colin at AML a try, he had plenty of the stereo version in stock a few weeks back.

tarandfeathers wrote:Alps Ks should be easy to get. Give Colin at AML a try, he had plenty of the stereo version in stock a few weeks back.

great! thanks.

so I got a new master fader from the swiss Tascam dealer. works great. cleaning the channel faders didn't help at all. I ran a test signal (pink noise) through every single channel and realised that about half of the faders have a problem around - + 5 dB. I think I should start to save some money to replace them.

I was looking around in the www for those ALPS K faders but I only found those with 3 pins on the front side while mine have 6 pins (the mono channel).
do I get something wrong here?

AML definitely stock the stereo (6 pin) version. I don't understand why they'd use a stereo fader for the mono channels. Are all the pins connected on every channel?

tarandfeathers wrote:AML definitely stock the stereo (6 pin) version. I don't understand why they'd use a stereo fader for the mono channels. Are all the pins connected on every channel?

that's what I don't get. color me stupid but I thought: 3 pins in 3 pins out. the picture in my first post is a channel fader (mono). the master fader I've got also did not look like the one's from AML. it's bigger and some parts of the body are made of plastic and it has 6 pins on the front- and 3 on the back side.

Sounds like an odd scheme. Does the Desk have VCA automation or something like that installed? Three pins should be all you need connected on a mono fader, and six for stereo.