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In the 50s and early 60s most of our parents had "hifi" consoles (pieces of furniture) with record changers and a radio. Our parents would buy us portable "record players" some of these were changers and some were single play. The portables were brought to dance parties at parent's houses. In...

I have an AU 5500 manufactured in 1974 which I bought new at a PX in Italy while in the Army. It is still working fine. I also have an AU 919 (much later vintage) which I bought about 10 years ago which also works great. I may be a Philistine, but I enjoy the highly colored sound of the 5500...

I own an AU-919 that works fine, but I had an AU-7700 that had a solder break on the I/O board. The soldering for this repair is rather tricky so though I usually do my own repairs I gave it a shot with this guy on Ebay. The guy specializes in AU-919s but I sent my AU-7700 to him and within a...

Pot calling the kettle black methinks. Providing an alternative (and accepted by professional logisticians) maintenance philosophy is the opposite of dogma. If it saves an owner a bit of money, all the better.

And I posted the reason I prefer the alternative approach. And provided links to technical papers that state why that approach is viable and preferable.

Mission critical military or industrial systems are maintained the way they are because optimal performance and reliability are paramount since lives are at stake. If the wholesale exchange of components at set time intervals increased reliability and performance (and increased service life)...

Oh come on. An acceptable ESR value depends upon capacitance and can be read from a table of "typical" values, or compared with a new component. While the the capacitor manufacturer's upper limit specification for ESR can be looked up in a data sheet, it is unnecessary. When a capacitor whose...

Agreed for the most part, but for even the small caps, heating up the board with a heater to 100 plus F and testing all the small caps with an ESR meter will take less time than replacing one small cap for most DIYers.

I stated my background to make sure that readers did not assume that I was was just taking a position without any basis. Sorry about the petulant "what do I know", it was unnecessary and silly. I do have some experience in this area working in the radar, C2 and general mission critical systems...

ESR is 95% of the issue. If you want to get really accurate on the potential life of a cap get an LCR meter too. Still cheaper than the willy nilly replacement of caps. But heck, I'm only an MSEE and 30+ year member of the IEEE. What do I know.

Well, you said it yourself, "they are very cheap too". Chances are the existing cap will have an ESR similar (or better) than the new cheap replacement. Now if these "change all the caps" proponents replaced the existing, perfectly functional caps, with MIL-PRF-55681/4 or /5 rated equivalents...

Working in the defense industry and having some familiarity with the various iterations of MIL-HDBK-217 operational MTBF ratings are often up to 4 times the calculated rate. The returned ESR value of a capacitor being tested in circuit, if equal to or nearly equal to the value of a new...

ESR meters have come down in price to under 100 bucks for pretty accurate ones. Why anyone would willy nilly replace capacitors without first testing them is beyond me. Anyway, I have an AU 919 and an Au-5500 and I found a guy on Ebay that advertised a complete overhaul for a 919 for $250. I...

There is no reason not to use an auction site for refurbishment services if the service provider has excellent feedback from a large base of users. In fact, the availability of such feedback from dozens if not hundreds of users is a better predictor of the quality of service than a handful of...

I have an AU-919 that has had minimal use and an AU-5500 that had a lot of use. The latter had started to have problems in the early 80s and I only found it a few years ago stored in a closet with a matching tuner. When I put the AU-5500 back into use, I was surprised how it sounded compared...

When I was repairing/refurbishing TTs I would always recommend the Shure M97xE. It was under 100 bucks and was similar to the V15s that were used on Technics TTs of that vintage.

I repaired/refurbished turntables for several years so I have a large collection of cartridges possibly 100 or more.

Technics SL 1400 or SL 1700

I have to go with the Transcriptors.

Back when I was repairing and refurbishing these turntables, and I've worked on hundreds of them, I would get a lot of them where the owner had tried to perform the repair and did not succeed and caused further damage. It is not an easy job. Just a friendly warning.

Grounding a non-conductive plinth is unnecessary, rather, useless. I don't think many are familiar with the SPs.

By the way, since audio systems are unbalanced, it is important that the system be allowed to float with respect to the real earth ground. So it's best not to use plugs with the ground terminal. This eliminates the chance of possible multiple return paths for the signal grounding system...

Main figures of merit: Thorens TD-160 Technics SL-1600 original Rumble -68 dB weighted Rumble -72 dB weighted Wow & Flutter .06% Wow & Flutter .025% I owned a a Thorens TD 115 in the early 80s concurrently with an...

Picked up a very good Rolling Stones "Between the Buttons" London Stereo PS-499 LP at Goodwill for a buck. Unbelievable.