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headphone problems with Kenwood amp

garybob

garybob

New Member
Hope someone here can help me. I have a Kenwood KA-601 amp along with Kenwood tuner and cassette deck. When I plug headphones into the amp....no sound comes through the headphones and of course the music continues through the speakers. I have both Koss and a pair of Realistic Nova's. Both do the same thing. Please help, the walls are thin and the neighbors complain if my stereo is barely turned up. Thanx in advance.
 
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I've never met a KA-601 in person, but I took a look at the schematic and the headphone output wiring seems utterly conventional. The headphone jack is fed through 220 ohm resistors from the output side of the protection relay. That's the same source as the speaker selector switch, so if the speakers have sound, then there has to be signal getting to the resistors. It would be extremely unusual for both resistors to fail.

If the ground connection to the headphone jack went bad, there would be very little sound in the phones, but there would be some. The difference between the left and right channel would be heard in the phones. Are you sure that there is no sound at all?

I think the most likely explanation would be a rather extreme case of oxidization (or other contamination) of the contacts that are supposed to make contact with the headphone plug. Here again, it's very unusual for that sort of thing to affect both L and R channel equally. But if you've got Deoxit or similar, you could try wetting one of your headphone plugs with the Deoxit, then plugging in to the amp, and rotating the plug back and forth a bit to get some contact wiping action.

Good luck,

chazix
 
If the ground connection failed to the headphones, you'd get an eerie reverberative mono sound through the headphones (because the phones use the same ground for both L and R channels, what you end up with in the phones when you lose the ground is essentially the difference between channels, or L-R).

I suspect that the headphone jack is simply broken.
 
Oh! I second EchoWars' idea (headphone jack is broken). Why didn't I think of that?
 
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