Portastudio 414 start-up question

[Jaybird]

Hi and thanks for any help you might give me. I found my portastudio 414 the other day and it worked fine last time a friend of mine used it but that was few years back. It looks great, powers up using a correct generic a/c power adapter I just got and the power light comes on but all 4 round record led buttons are blinking too with no cassette inserted. Is that normal and if not, any info you might shed on it would be greatly appreciated. I looked at a pdf manual but saw no info regarding this. Thanks.

 

[baremountain]

Hey Jaybird, did you check the arm switches? The four record lights blinking means that all four tracks are armed - if you push play & record at the same time, they'll record whatever input is going through each channel. To stop them from blinking, you need to flip the switches above the channel sliders from either the track number or L/R to "Safe". That should stop the lights from blinking. But remember, before you record you need to arm the channel that you're trying to record on by switching to either the channel number or L/R, depending on what your input is.