I was thinking last night that Electrohome in general was a big customer of Philips electrolytics - the experience there were very few failures. As they used Rubycon in Plannar they must have thought these were superior to Philips. A slight cost advantage would not make the difference to switch - it would have been quality. I think I will not change my electrolytics and see what happens. My stereo has very few hours on it. Changing them, especially for products made in early 2000s is a very good idea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague My mother's 1969 RCA stereo surprisingly still works great. It is a big RCA console with guts made in Japan. She has some 78 RPM records.
An old friend of mine worked on the two Voyager spacecraft about same time as Plannar - - he had worked on the design of the camera lens and color filters and gyroscope - I had asked him about any electrolytics in there (my girfriend got a new Apple motherboard because of this) and he didn't really know what was used - he was mostly optics. He did say the electronics technology was old (compared to today) and he is surprised the two of them are still working after all this time. I said maybe because it was such old technology... Old stuff can still perform.....especially in radiation of space.
I think you can remove the two wires. They do not belong there. Someone had a reason to bypass the tape switches and tone controls - maybe was part of a sound system in a business like a restaurant and had trouble people changing knobs ?? This is Is weird.
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The capacitors with the colour bands are also Philips - metal film too - very low failure rate. It cost a ton of money to fix a piece of gear in the field so reliability was key but not always successfully adhered too. The tiny gum drop capacitors are tantalum and used only for low noise etc because expensive. I don't know if they dry out - some might. When defective they usually short. C632 and C532 on small board are tantalums. They can be self-healing after a short and I have seen this strange behaviour.
Marantz used Japanese resistors once they shifted production from the USA. They were also metal film. The resistors that would go bad were high value (megohm) and connected to high voltages like hundreds or thousands volts and found mostly in TVs. Regular carbon were better for this where noise and tolerance didn't matter. The look and feel inside your receiver is how Electrohome products looked like starting with the C10 colour TV. Even the schematics are the same. I attach a couple of boards from an organ. PCBs were mostly made by Lightning Circuits of Niagara on the Lake. Electrohome liked to make their products with lots of space on the boards to make servicing easier - compared to Japanese and some US stuff all smushed together and hard to get at. Electrohome like the recommendations of local repair people.
I uploaded a photo of the connectors and transistor socket - these are easy to spot. I tested the sockets by tapping very lightly with a pen to see if any noise came out - only one was dirty and easily fixed. Of course, a good idea to clean the pots and switches with some contact cleaner. My serial number is faded too hard to read. It is not a good idea to start your serial numbers at zero - your competitors can tell how many you are selling which is not good. I believe Electrohome numbers are sequential but don't start at zero. Not too sure though - that was a long time ago. At their peak - they made either 250 or 500 colour tv a day (I forget which). They were looking to double that but there were scaling problems especially from suppliers. I don't think they doubled production. The first digit is the product. I doubt Plannar production was very high. It was tough to sell anything CDN or American against the Japanese invasion such as Sony in this compact stereo market. Marketing is very complicated.
If you look on the top of the radio capacitor there are some big felt pads. These are there in case during shipping a mechanical resonance is set up and the PCB can get broken. I have seen this with other products too - they get destroyed during shipping. Really amazing......
The cardboard box these plannars came in was huge ! I don't think I have a picture - but it was very big. In those days big and heavy was good as it portrayed quality and value for the dollar.
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