Replacement for stereo receiver??

[<aemeijers]

(snip)

Chuckle. Dust or anything else. Most of my stereo/TV equipment came out of the dumpsters at the apartments I used to live at, and the rest came from garage sales or ebay. The dumpster stuff usually got peed in by a cat or a drunk, and blasting the motherboard with contact cleaner brought it right back. Sometimes I had to replace fuses that gave their lives protecting the unit from dead shorts. I even made some money selling a few salvaged receivers at my sister&#39;s garage sale a couple years ago. I doubt I have more than 200 bucks in the 2 complete stereo setups I currently have, including some nice speakers.

Don&#39;t forget, for most people, electronics is PFM, and it would never occur to them to open the cases. I&#39;m no engineer or electronics expert, but I am willing to degunk and fix trivial/cheap stuff. I wouldn&#39;t pay a bench fee, but for a nice piece, I&#39;ll spend an hour or two putzing around before I give up.

aem sends...

[JoeSpareBedroom]

You had some sort of intermittent symptoms because of cracks in the circuit board, or cold solder joints. Some Technics home audio stuff had serious problems like that. It&#39;s called "Sanyo Syndrome". Panasonic woke up and improved things a bit, eventually.

[JoeSpareBedroom]

I just did that with a Panasonic cordless phone whose keypad stopped working. It made absolutely NO sense. Most Panasonic stuff&#39;s pretty well made, and this phone was never mistreated. I opened it up and found a layer of something like bacon grease between the soft pushbutton pad and the circuit board, which contained the pressure sensitive dots. WTF? The phone lived nowhere near the kitchen. I cleaned the bejeezus out of it with isopropyl alcohol and it&#39;s a new phone all over again.

[gfretwell]

Every amp I have had "go bad" was really a bad selector switch, either on the inputs or the outputs. I have a bad Pioneer, Yamaha and some captive brand. I am not sure why they can&#39;t put a decent switch on an amp that costs several hundred dollars. They are all some proprietary design, soldered directly to the board so replacement or cleaning is virtually impossible. I cut the switch out of the Pioneer and jumpered in one set of inputs and outputs so I could use it for my MP3 player. It works great that way. I am still living with the Yamaha but I have to screw with the selector whenever I use it.

[mm]

I bought a Technics receiver, dual cassette deck, and surround sound from about 1988, for 10 dollars on Sunday. Probably sold for more than 600 dollars originally. His parents had moved out of state and the house was sold and he had until the 18th to get rid of everythign.

On another occaions I passed up a Marantz receiver and some other device (cassette?) for 10 dollars, because I didn&#39;t need it, but I regretted it so I bought these.

[Mortimer Schnerd, RN]

Why don&#39;t you get a can of contact cleaner, unplug the amp, remove the knobs and then spray the bejeezus out of them while you work them back and forth from one side to the other? I&#39;ve fixed plenty of noisy pots with contact cleaner spray. Cheap, too.

[kellyj00]

Here&#39;s how I see this, as I used to sell home stereos a few years back when I was in college (at best buy, no less)...

Information gathered from observation and talking to every tom, dick and harry who visited best buy to piss on our equipment...

Look at the THD number on a new reciever... the less the better, this is the real bottom line spec as I understand it. THD = Total Harmonic Distortion. This number increases exponentially as the volume is raised...both numbers will be in the "specs sheet" for the new reciever. You can ask at best buy for these documents because they have one for each piece of equipment they sell...be polite but assertive, you can get anything done.

Also, when you go to buy a reciever, feel how heavy it is. You WANT heavy receivers. The advent of &#39;switching power supplies&#39; (the things they run computers off of, and almost everything else now) have kinda taken over most consumer electronics, but you can find some receivers that still use the big, heavy &#39;transformer&#39; that it replaced... you can tell if it has a transformer by how heavy the unit is near the power cord. Onkyo, Yamaha, and Technics until they got bought out by Matsushita/Panasonic around the millinium all had the transformers.

Don&#39;t worry about a phono input if you have a record player...you&#39;ll never find a set of pre-amped inputs anymore... just buy a $30 pre-amp if you have a turntable, it will degrade the sound quality, but IT&#39;S A PIECE OF VINYL, with little pits in it that creates sound... it&#39;s got horrible quality anyhow.

Now, a few notes... a decent 2-channel (handles 2 speakers at once, call it stereo for you old timers) is gonna run you almost the same as a decent Dolby 5.1 which has the ability to not only run your basic two speakers with the same power, but hook up another 3 and a subwoofer for a real home theater experience. You can switch between 2 channel and

5.1 on every reciever I&#39;ve seen...but you&#39;ll actually have to read the manual with a 5.1 reciever, they get kinda complex compared to the plug and they work 2-channel deals.

Technics ain&#39;t technics any more...don&#39;t buy anything made after the late 90&#39;s with the technics brand expecting the same quality at your older models...same for Pioneer, I have a pioneer that is really nice, but it&#39;s definitely cheaply made. Their car equipment is still good, but home stereos are...cheap seeming. sound is good though.

good luck... let me know if you&#39;ve got any more questions or need info on how to hook something up, that stuff gets complicated quickly.

[Puddin' Man]

-That- was a very interesting rundown of the market in the last, what?, 20 years? Much thanks.

LIttle update: I fiddled this n&#39; that, vacuumed some boards, and the old Technics digital rec. sounds much better. For how much longer I dunno.

I&#39;ve had 5 pairs of speakers connected (via some little Radio Shack box) for about 20 years now. A "decent Dolby 5.1" rec. would similarly support such insanity in 2-channel mode?

Thanks, Puddin&#39;

"A truly good birddawg, even if you never, ever hunt her, is a Precious, Precious Thing! Mayhap ruin ya for h*mo sapiens ..."