I've got a sharp optonica, I've recently fixed it up, play back is usually perfect, but I've noticed the left channel seems to go quiet after a while, cleaning the head fixes it, so I thought maybe it was just dirt from dad's old used and abused tapes gunking it up, but just the left channel is the weird thing.

Anyway, cleaned it, good condition tape in to check playback and it's perfectly balanced. So I go to record and all the levels seems to be how they need to be, but the left channel consistently comes out quiet.

This is a two head deck, before I go looking for gain adjustments in the recording circuitry, could this be a head issue or azimuth? I've only fixed walkmans with no azimuth adjustment, so this is a new problem to me.

Cheers, sorry for the novel. Other than the panning, even though it's type 1 tape, it's nearly indistinguishable from the source. Which spun me out a little tbh