No, you'll still need to drop the voltage. About the hot/neutral thing, one way to check is to use your voltmeter to test the AC wall outlet. One of the slots will measure 120VAC to the ground prong. That's the hot wire. The other slot should measure 0V. That's neutral. Once the step down transformer is connected to the wall, you should measure the same relationship at its IEC outlet. The only difference is that the ground connection is a slot rather than a round socket. This will confirm that everything from the wall to the output of the step down transformer is OK. We have to assume the AC cable plugged into the transformer is also OK, so the only thing left is the wiring inside the amplifier. It might be a little tricky without a schematic, but generally speaking, there shoujld be a wire connected to the hot terminal of the IEC connected directly to a fuse holder. From there, it should travel to the power switch and anything that's supposed to be powered all the time, like a microprocessor or remote control board. In your amp, the IEC is integrated with the fuse holder and power switch. Once you know which input pin of the IEC is hot, it should be possible to determine the rest with an ohmmeter. I know it's a bit of trouble opening the amp for this, but I think it's worth doing.
Jack
@TriodeLuvr I hope you are well.
I opened the amplifier, took some photos, and inspected the cables coming out from the fused IEC power switch.
My Variac is arriving in 4 days or so. So, I have not been able to take voltages inside. But, photos are already telling a story.
If you look at the complete photo of the amplifier, below. That shows in green the ground path coming out from the fused IEC power switch. I know that prong is ground because I found a wiring diagram for that power switch online. In that photo you can see that the green line carrying ground meets another two lines in a first stop (Number 1 in the picture) and gets attached to the plate of the amp, and then it goes to stop 2. (Number 2 in the photo). So, i think that ground is OK in the amplifier, right?
Now, for polarity it is more complex I believe.
If you look at the other picture attached, on the left side it is the correct wiring for USA polarity for the fused IEC power switch, and on the right side is the wiring I found inside the amplifier. I am copying below a text from the wiring instructions I found:
¨Power connects to the front, and the exposed electrodes are on the back. A fuse connects the "unfused hot" to the "fused hot" section on the back (see image). The fuse is internal to the enclosure and can be accessed from the front.To incorporate the switch into the circuit, two jumpers need to connect the left-most electrodes to the switch. Notice that the switch has two sets of electrodes, the narrower set and the wider set. The jumpers should connect the socket electrodes to the narrow set in order for the LED in the switch to work. Polarity shouldn't matter. Wires connected to the wide set of electrodes, in addition to the ground, continue on to your load.¨
So, the in the amplifier wiring, the jumpers are there connected to the narrow set of sockets, but with different polarity, although according to the instructions that should not matter. The load goes to the wider set of sockets on the right side. I have painted the cables that could be hot or neutral with colors, hot is either the blue or the yellow cable. Nevertheless, the weird thing is that there is no cable connected to the most right socket of the wider pair of sockets.
Any help is greatly welcome!
Thanks,
Alan
