How time flies. I was 18. The 1974 RS catalog has them listed on page 24 (see link below). And they were sold with a "Lifetime Guarantee!" Just like those "Lifetime Guarantee" vacuum tubes!
Just finishing up the restoration on a Thorens TD-125. This thing is a tank. It weighs just under 40 lbs. with the arm. I think this is Sapele veneer. Not entirely sure because the pieces were in my leftovers box. It turned out darker than I really wanted. Still, it looks much better than when I picked it up a few weeks ago. I planed down some white oak for a new arm board so I could mount this Acos Lustre GST-1 arm. I added a plate on the back for RCAs & Gnd. That banana jack is just too big, so I'm on the lookout for something more appropriate. I'm waiting on new aluminum switch covers and a belt to arrive, but it's spinning LPs like a champ!
New (to me) amp on the bench! A Sansui AU-717 that needs some TLC. No sound from the amp section. It turned out to be open fuse resistors on the amp boards, which is really common with these. I'm replacing some caps while I'm in there and scraping off all the corrosive glue they used to hold them down. Once it's up and running again, it'll get a full restoration. There's more glue and probably some heat damage on the power supply board.
Being a Pioneer guy, I had no idea this 717 was one of the most popular & higher rated Sansui models. I did some minor work on a friend's 517 and thought it was a great sounding piece. This one is not in perfect cosmetic shape, but it's perfectly presentable.
I got both of the amp modules running, but the preamp section has some minor issues. The R channel has some distortion and the power supply needs some work too. This glue on the PS board is killing me! I've already spent 90 minutes slathering on the acetone & scraping and I only have 40% of it removed.
Holy cow! $2k and up for the non-DB version. I have a fairly nice 9090 that I picked up at a local pawn shop years ago for $120. It works just fine, but I'll do a full restoration on it some day and re-veneer the case while I'm at it.
@Tom_S said:
Holy cow! $2k and up for the non-DB version. I have a fairly nice 9090 that I picked up at a local pawn shop years ago for $120. It works just fine, but I'll do a full restoration on it some day and re-veneer the case while I'm at it.
Wish all my investments were doing that well!
Wow! Amazing what some of these old amps are going for. That old, beat up looking 60wpc integrated JBL amp that I posted earlier in this thread is going for 4K+ on some listings. Can you believe that? I'm almost afraid to work on it. Disturbing the original dust build up and/or replacing leaky caps may be considered a bad thing by vintage collectors!
@PWRRYD said:
This was the 80's for me (not that I had Techics).
Yeah, I dreamed of something like that in the 80's. I actually got a low-end Onkyo receiver in college but had to pawn in after about a year to pay tuition.
I started with Technics/Panasonic for my own stack; SA-EX810 receiver, SH-AC500D digital 6 channel surround AC decoder Dac, and a Panny 5 disc carousel. Still use the SH on occasion for dac duties.
My folks had a Pioneer SX-60 stereo receiver, dual-well Pioneer CT-05(?) pre-auto-reverse tape deck, and Sony linear tracking turntable.
Bill, that JBL amp is very cool, rare piece. I'll bet there are JBL collectors right here in the Midwest who would love one. I know there's a guy up near Waterloo who has a small herd of 70s & 80s JBL speakers. He also has a few nice Marantz pieces too.
@Tom_S said:
Bill, that JBL amp is very cool, rare piece. I'll bet there are JBL collectors right here in the Midwest who would love one. I know there's a guy up near Waterloo who has a small herd of 70s & 80s JBL speakers. He also has a few nice Marantz pieces too.
I remember looking over this amp at the re-store and thinking, do I really want to spend $25 for this old, crusty looking amplifier? It was not until I got it home that I found out how much it was really worth, as a vintage, rare collector's item. Re-store employees must price alot of this stuff quickly, based on appearance alone, without doing much research. Which is good for me!
This Sansui is the gift that keeps on giving! I finally got the power supply board scraped clean and recapped it. I had to replace a few resistors and diodes too because the glue had started to corrode the leads. Then I attacked the tone/flat amp board. I was seeing what looked like crossover distortion on the pre outputs.
Luckily there was no glue to deal with. I replaced all the electrolytic caps, transistors and a few more fusible resistors that had gone bad. You can see R37 & R39 got hot enough at some point to change from gray to white in the middle.
The PreOut/PwrIn switch is another known issue with these and mine definitely has a problem. I went take the board out, only to find they glued the plastic pin fasteners on the inside! I tried acetone and that didn't do a thing. The Dremel tool was just making a mess. I ended up drilling them out with a pin vice. That's where I'm at now - it's running and sounding good, but I'm waiting for 4 new main filter caps from Mouser (get them now before the are NLA!) and some plastic fasteners from Amazon.
I've been making headway this past week on the refurb of a Yamaha M-80. My buddy said there was no sound out of one channel, I set about pulling the 3 relays (it has a DPDP and a pair of 4PDT). Still need to get the 2-pole removed--the damn pins didn't fit in my solder sucker, my braid was all oxidized and my flux went missing. I gave up for the day
I bought new relays regardless. They're a common failure with Yamahas of this era I guess, and, you know..."while I'm in here..."
I still intend to test the ones I pulled. It would be nice to get a simple definitive answer as to why one channel went out, vs the solution being "one of the many parts I threw at it".
Tom, what sort of loads are you using for your scope?
I definitely have had those days when I just walk away and I agree with you on the "while I'm in here..."!!
I have a dummy load/speaker switcher built into a rack unit. It's basically some cheap 8 ohm/100W resistors on a heatsink and I'm just clipping the probes onto the banana jacks.
I got a box of parts from Mouser today. They are serious about packing! The 4 main power supply caps were in 3 nested bubble wrap pouches, wrapped in 3 more layers of bubble wrap.
@Tom_S said:
I got a box of parts from Mouser today. They are serious about packing! The 4 main power supply caps were in 3 nested bubble wrap pouches, wrapped in 3 more layers of bubble wrap.
Nice set of caps. Kemet are high quality units with very long spec sheet life ratings. I downloaded the spec sheet and noticed that these have a life rating of 26,000 hours at 85F. A couple years ago, I picked up a pair of 12,000uF, 200V Kemets from Mouser for my Heathkit AA-1640 power amp project. They are the ALS71A series and have a life rating of nearly 20,000 hours at 85F. And because the new caps were available in much smaller sizes than the original 7500uF, 100V caps that came with the amp, I was able to find 200V drop in replacements to give me a better safety margin as well as nearly double the original capacitance. The rails in my AA-1640 are running at +/- 91 volts DC.
Comments
How time flies. I was 18. The 1974 RS catalog has them listed on page 24 (see link below). And they were sold with a "Lifetime Guarantee!" Just like those "Lifetime Guarantee" vacuum tubes!
https://radioshackcatalogs.com/flipbook/1974_radioshack_catalog.html
Just finishing up the restoration on a Thorens TD-125. This thing is a tank. It weighs just under 40 lbs. with the arm. I think this is Sapele veneer. Not entirely sure because the pieces were in my leftovers box. It turned out darker than I really wanted. Still, it looks much better than when I picked it up a few weeks ago. I planed down some white oak for a new arm board so I could mount this Acos Lustre GST-1 arm. I added a plate on the back for RCAs & Gnd. That banana jack is just too big, so I'm on the lookout for something more appropriate. I'm waiting on new aluminum switch covers and a belt to arrive, but it's spinning LPs like a champ!
New (to me) amp on the bench! A Sansui AU-717 that needs some TLC. No sound from the amp section. It turned out to be open fuse resistors on the amp boards, which is really common with these. I'm replacing some caps while I'm in there and scraping off all the corrosive glue they used to hold them down. Once it's up and running again, it'll get a full restoration. There's more glue and probably some heat damage on the power supply board.
Oooooh, that is a REALLY nice integrated amp! Very highly rated...
Being a Pioneer guy, I had no idea this 717 was one of the most popular & higher rated Sansui models. I did some minor work on a friend's 517 and thought it was a great sounding piece. This one is not in perfect cosmetic shape, but it's perfectly presentable.
I got both of the amp modules running, but the preamp section has some minor issues. The R channel has some distortion and the power supply needs some work too. This glue on the PS board is killing me! I've already spent 90 minutes slathering on the acetone & scraping and I only have 40% of it removed.
Check out how much a mint Sansui 9090 goes for!
Holy cow! $2k and up for the non-DB version. I have a fairly nice 9090 that I picked up at a local pawn shop years ago for $120. It works just fine, but I'll do a full restoration on it some day and re-veneer the case while I'm at it.
Wish all my investments were doing that well!
Wow! Amazing what some of these old amps are going for. That old, beat up looking 60wpc integrated JBL amp that I posted earlier in this thread is going for 4K+ on some listings. Can you believe that? I'm almost afraid to work on it. Disturbing the original dust build up and/or replacing leaky caps may be considered a bad thing by vintage collectors!
This was the 80's for me (not that I had Techics).
Yeah, I dreamed of something like that in the 80's. I actually got a low-end Onkyo receiver in college but had to pawn in after about a year to pay tuition.
I started with Technics/Panasonic for my own stack; SA-EX810 receiver, SH-AC500D digital 6 channel surround AC decoder Dac, and a Panny 5 disc carousel. Still use the SH on occasion for dac duties.
My folks had a Pioneer SX-60 stereo receiver, dual-well Pioneer CT-05(?) pre-auto-reverse tape deck, and Sony linear tracking turntable.
InDIYana Event Website
Bill, that JBL amp is very cool, rare piece. I'll bet there are JBL collectors right here in the Midwest who would love one. I know there's a guy up near Waterloo who has a small herd of 70s & 80s JBL speakers. He also has a few nice Marantz pieces too.
I don't have any vintage gear yet. The way I hold on to things, though, someday everything I own will be vintage.
Thats a sweet stack of Technics ! I should brush off the SA-GX770 and the SL-PG300.
Closest thing I've got, worth all of $75.
4ohm stable, though. Sounds good. Just not super high powered.
It's an Edelbrock, gotta be worth more than $75.
I only see you selling stuff
I remember looking over this amp at the re-store and thinking, do I really want to spend $25 for this old, crusty looking amplifier? It was not until I got it home that I found out how much it was really worth, as a vintage, rare collector's item. Re-store employees must price alot of this stuff quickly, based on appearance alone, without doing much research. Which is good for me!
This Sansui is the gift that keeps on giving! I finally got the power supply board scraped clean and recapped it. I had to replace a few resistors and diodes too because the glue had started to corrode the leads. Then I attacked the tone/flat amp board. I was seeing what looked like crossover distortion on the pre outputs.
Luckily there was no glue to deal with. I replaced all the electrolytic caps, transistors and a few more fusible resistors that had gone bad. You can see R37 & R39 got hot enough at some point to change from gray to white in the middle.
The PreOut/PwrIn switch is another known issue with these and mine definitely has a problem. I went take the board out, only to find they glued the plastic pin fasteners on the inside! I tried acetone and that didn't do a thing. The Dremel tool was just making a mess. I ended up drilling them out with a pin vice. That's where I'm at now - it's running and sounding good, but I'm waiting for 4 new main filter caps from Mouser (get them now before the are NLA!) and some plastic fasteners from Amazon.
Great work Tom!
I appreciate everything about this.
I've been making headway this past week on the refurb of a Yamaha M-80. My buddy said there was no sound out of one channel, I set about pulling the 3 relays (it has a DPDP and a pair of 4PDT). Still need to get the 2-pole removed--the damn pins didn't fit in my solder sucker, my braid was all oxidized and my flux went missing. I gave up for the day
I bought new relays regardless. They're a common failure with Yamahas of this era I guess, and, you know..."while I'm in here..."
I still intend to test the ones I pulled. It would be nice to get a simple definitive answer as to why one channel went out, vs the solution being "one of the many parts I threw at it".
Tom, what sort of loads are you using for your scope?
I definitely have had those days when I just walk away and I agree with you on the "while I'm in here..."!!
I have a dummy load/speaker switcher built into a rack unit. It's basically some cheap 8 ohm/100W resistors on a heatsink and I'm just clipping the probes onto the banana jacks.
I got a box of parts from Mouser today. They are serious about packing! The 4 main power supply caps were in 3 nested bubble wrap pouches, wrapped in 3 more layers of bubble wrap.
Like your posts Tom!
Trying to sell stuff. Not always successful lol.
Mouser is top notch.
Nice set of caps. Kemet are high quality units with very long spec sheet life ratings. I downloaded the spec sheet and noticed that these have a life rating of 26,000 hours at 85F. A couple years ago, I picked up a pair of 12,000uF, 200V Kemets from Mouser for my Heathkit AA-1640 power amp project. They are the ALS71A series and have a life rating of nearly 20,000 hours at 85F. And because the new caps were available in much smaller sizes than the original 7500uF, 100V caps that came with the amp, I was able to find 200V drop in replacements to give me a better safety margin as well as nearly double the original capacitance. The rails in my AA-1640 are running at +/- 91 volts DC.
That Heathkit amp is a brute! I just looked at the schematic and see 8 output devices/channel! That's an amp you could probably use to arc-weld.