I took my RS1500 to Adam Liberman for regular servicing, alignment, and to have the record bias set for RMGI SM911 tape. This was a few weeks before Doc announced that he'd be doing servicing and mods to optimize the Technics machines. Adam works on tape and film machines and has a very impressive list of regular clients listed on his web site. He does a lot of "on location servicing" of film gear and has a small but very well equipped shop in El Cerrito Ca.( just a couple of miles north of Berkeley ). He's pretty busy so unless you specify when you will need your deck back, it could take a while.
When I took my 1500 in, I thought it was working great ( I've had it about 1.5 years) and was interested to get a baseline of performance. As far as I can figure, I think it sounds at least 10-15% better! I guess it did need alignment! Adam provided a detailed description of the work performed along with a graph of freq. responce of 15 ips 2T playback,7.5 ips 2T playback,7.5 ips 4T playback, record@15ips (which I asked for the bias to set for) and record @7.5 ips. I've been listening to a stack of tapes that I've gotten while it was in the shop and it seems like sounds like triangles, drum hits and pianos are more real sounding. I think that the work done to the tape handling areas may be the reason for this improvement. I can't wait to have Doc reduce flutter even more!
To conclude, Liberman was recommended by Richard Links over on Tape Trail and I'd like to pass it along. I like the little "pro" touches , like a sticker that gives what the bias is set for, when it was done, the work order #, and the position of the switches for that bias.
Like I said though, he's busy, so in the future, I'll give him a date that I want the machine back.
BTW there were a couple of surface scratches on the headblock. One of the few cosmetic flaws on my beloved 1500. Well, they aren't there no more! I tried to rub them out once with no luck. And he didn't even mention it! Now that my decks off his bench, he's starting on a Studer 810.
libermansound.com