On Wednesday, January 9, 2019 at 3:30:16 PM UTC-5, wrote:
wrote: "Other way round."

Nope. I hooked the thing up via literal interpretation, and
got no playback audio from tapes, and nothing recorded
to blanks.

Once I reversed them, like I said, everything worked as it
was expected to.

And as can be seen from Terry's testimony some posts back,
I'm not the only one experiencing gear labeled counterintuitively
to how it was supposed to be hooked up.

You weren't there in either of our cases, so you can't refute
either of our experiences.


No one is calling you a liar, but after nearly 50 years repairing consumer electronics as a career, I've never seen one wired like that. To me, this means the examples you cite are aberrations or at least a very small percentage of the units in service. They could have been wired that way intentionally or maybe the jacks or TM switch were miswired. It's also possible the rear panel was simply silk-screened incorrectly or a revised version was released with the previous version's back panel.

As I pointed out above, the other possibility is that the INs and OUTs were prefaced by "connect to", which changes the context entirely. I recall some low end packaged component systems that did not use universal nomenclature, but had connection "instructions" on the back panel (ie: connect to tape deck output).