Watkins Copicat tonesuck/volume drop/messyness

[sun baked snow cave]

Hello all!

So I bought a watkins copicat about 4 months ago. I think it is the MKIV.Love the thing and play it all the time BUT I seem to have a huge tone suck from it. It isn't just a loss of treble that most people get which is appealing. It is tone suck with a big volume drop. Could it be the output, since that cable and quarter inch jack would be 40 years old?

It also reacts very weird when I put it infront of pedals (the old jack going into a pedal). It make everything super low volume and makes my fuzz pedals less fuzzy.

I opened the thing up and it is surprisingly super clean and has minimal dust. The whole delay unit looks like it has been put in a time capsule, just not sure about this tone suck/volume drop.

I was thinking about modding it to have a quaterinch jack out instead of some long huge old cable.

if you guys know anything PLEASE HELP A BROTHA OUT

[skullservant]

Could be the cable, could also just be the nature of the delay itself. I think we are so used to true bypass now-a-days that we sometimes may forget the quirks of vintage units. Could you just put a clean boost directly after it to take care of it? That'd be the least intrusive of all the situations, you could even just leave the clean boost on all the time to make up for the volume drop

[dubkitty]

is the clean signal screwed up, or just the repeats? what's the condition of the tape loop? have you tried cleaning the heads?

[tuffteef]

potentially input impedance/divider issues?
which is apparent on most tape delays and shaves some highs off from you could do a common drain mod

but if its like a huge volume drop im not sure