Overall Quality Rating Scale for our Audio Reproduction Manuals

Overall Quality Ratings Are Individually Assigned to Each Item
Excellent	Typical responses from buyers are, "Wow! This is much better than expected." Photo-type illustrations if present, are clear. Text and line drawings are crisp and clear (or otherwise identical to the original). As with any type of printing and as with many original manuals, there may be a few random tiny specks but essentially are free of anything that doesn't belong.
Very Good	The majority of our customers usually call these excellent. These are almost exactly the same as those we rate as Excellent with only some very minor and sometimes difficult to describe difference. Often it is a subtle imperfection of some sort or it may nothing more than the fact that the item in question is unremarkable, even though it may look precisely like the original. It may be that the original had covers printed with some amount of color and we decided to not do in color.
Good to Very Good	This should be self-explanatory.
Good	Most people would pick up this item and say, "This is a nice reproduction." Text is perfectly easy to read but may not be crisp or it might be a little darker or a little lighter than perfection. There may be some areas of the original that will not reproduce perfectly. There may be some spot or mark introduced by the printing equipment. There may be some small areas with some light smudges, smears, streaks, specks, or stray marks. It may be that we had to lighten or darken much more than normal on some pages in order to bring out (or eliminate) some difficult areas.
Fair to Good	This should be self-explanatory.
Fair	The majority of people would look at this item and say, "This is ok... certainly nothing to brag about but nothing much to complain loudly about either." Part or all of it has a typical photocopy appearance with various degrees of quality. Some areas may be great and others relatively poor. Text is not hard to read but is not crisp and clear either. Pages may have various imperfections. There might be some smudges, smears, streaks, specks, etc. In almost all cases these will be made from a factory reprint instead of a first printing manual. Or it may be our "original" is a copy. These are almost always discounted from normal price schedule.
Poor	This is reserved for the very few items we have that we offer in spite of it's overall quality. Always made from a copy or a badly damaged original. We may even have spent a lot of time attempting to clean it up in order to bring it up to our poor rating. This item will have some or all the imperfections you might expect from someone making copies of copies by carelessly slapping stuff on a copy machine. It will useful in some manner... otherwise we would not be offering it at all.

Some service manuals have sections with extraordinarily small print (2-4 point type size) on a few or several pages. Worse yet, some of this tiny printing was done in a light pastel color in the originals. These conditions are usually found on a schematic or a printed circuit board layout. In a few cases some of it is virtually unreadable in the original even with a magnifying glass. Sometimes it is almost impossible to know what it says for certain. It makes one wonder what these companies were thinking when they printed them. We use very good equipment so that if it is readable in the original, it will almost always be so in our reproductions.

We are working to make sure our descriptions include this information when appropriate. We will be providing some sample scans and explanations of various company manuals that are problematic as soon as we can. Note that some service manuals from most any company (Especially see Akai Note) may have at least some original printing in strange colors like light purple, light green, light orange, light blue, light red or pink. And sometimes these are mixed together in the same illustration and it may have very thin lines or very small type size.

As long as our equipment is running nearly 100% perfect, we can almost always get a respectable (often excellent) reproduction without introducing any specks, distortions, smudges, etc. Sometimes we can't and those pages may have some slightly darker areas or may show some shadows of the printing from the opposite page side. We try *our best* to eliminate such problems even though sometimes that results in text that is slightly lighter/darker than would be desired. Or #1 goal in every case, is to make the information readable.