This is my first post and will start with a caveat and backstory. The caveat is although I have read a lot of this forum, I have certainly not read it all. Sorry if anything I bring up has been already hashed out 10 years ago. I want to share my experience just to get feedback, opinions and maybe even some confirmation from the community here.
I have always liked listening to music. I have a whole house audio system, several soundbars/surrounds/subs and even an outdoor system with buried sub for the pool. However shy of the Bowers & Wilkins system in my car, I have never really owned a proper system. So recently while rethinking my home office, I decided that I wanted to get a nice turntable, receiver and speakers. This led me down a rabbit hole of YouTube where I learned that there was a proper vintage audio store in my home town. On my first visit I found myself deciding between a Pioneer SX-1050 and a Marantz 2270. Both units really spoke to me from a vintage look and feel, but I was admittedly persuaded by all the videos praising the 2270 and of course the blue lights. So I plunked down, what I know realized was way to much money and came home with the 2270.
After getting this thing home I immediately started thinking about turntable and speakers. I like the vintage look of the JBL's and the Klipsch Heritage ( Fortes, Heresy, etc.). But before I spent that kind of money, I really wanted the chance to listen to them. So in the meantime I bought a pair of Klipsch RP-600m IIs as a holdover and an Eversolo DMP-A6 Streaming DAC so I could start pushing some music through this receiver. I have Apple Music and Amazon music, both of which allow to play hi-res lossless through the Everysolo natively.
At first I was kind of amazed. I couldn't turn the volume passed a quarter turn and it sounded great. I was reflecting on what the guy at the store told me. That this is 70 vintage watts and that is different than the watts of today...blah blah. I think he used the words face melting with some high efficiency Heresy's. I was thinking maybe there is something to that. haha. Of course what I later found out the hard way was that the DAC was pushing out 2.5 volts into the aux port that has a sensitivity of 180 mV. Essentially really overpowering the preamp. How did I learn this. I learned it one day when the receiver was quite warm from playing for a while and the song Juke Box Hero came on. About mid way through the song gets quite hot and the amp started to clip producing horrible popping noises in the speakers.
After reading a lot and doing some test, I realized I needed to turn down the output db's on the dac to not overload the preamp. I also tried to plug the dac directly into the main in, to skip the Marantz preamp. But honestly none of this really worked great. No matter what I did/do, there always seems to come a time when a certain song just pushes this thing to clip. I even bought a turntable and at just below or at half volume (11 or 12 o'clock) I start to hear the popping in the mid to low range.
At this point many of you might be thinking....
1) This guy is listening to music to loud
2) The speakers are the problem
3) Was this receiver restored, sounds like xyz capacitor, board, transistor needs to be replaced
I am here to tell you that all of the above may be true. But let me continue with part B of this story.
After buying this receiver I did what all good new vintage hobbiest do. I started stalking ebay and marketplace. And to my surprise not three weeks after I bought the 2270, another 2270 shows up on my local marketplace feed. It was certainly dirty and all but one lamp was burnt out, but before I knew it, I was driving 50 minutes to pick it up. This one was going to be a project for me and I paid less than 1/3 of what I paid for the first one. Here is a picture of it on the left. It is dirty!
Now I will not go to deep into the story of this second receiver except to say that I have since completely cleaned it up, replaced all the lamps, rebuilt the power supply board and replaced the main filter capacitors. As you can see this second one was made in '76 (the first one is from '75) and from my eye had never been touched. Amazingly it worked. It was missing the pre-out main in jumpers, the controls were dirty, but otherwise it made great sounds out of both channels. In fact the only thing I really counld find wrong with it was the protection relay would take a good 15-20 seconds to click and the power supply reference voltage for the tuner and such was reading around 12.8 which is lower than the 13.5 to 14.2 or whatever it should be. This is why I decided to rebuilt the power supply. Here is a couple of picutres of it now, still not completely together yet.
And here is the original Capacitors and a picture of this board used to install the new ones.
After these changes the protection relay clicks on in 3-4 seconds and all the reference voltages are in spec. So naturally I decided to do some listening. Guess what, this receiver behaves basically the same way. I thought it must be the speakers or these receivers just cant get as loud as I may want them occasionally. And don't get me wrong it can get loud. But every so often there is a song or two where I want just a touch more and just can't get it without clipping.
Now I promise I will try to wrap this up and fill in more details when/if someone starts asking questions, but for now, one last part of this story. As i tried to get to the bottom of this the scientific part of me kicked in and I bought an oscilloscope. I had read and heard so many people talking about how great these receivers are and how underrated they were where many were showing the units pushing 90 watts. So I had to test. Here is what I can tell you. Both of my receivers are putting out about 71-72 watts before clipping. Worse, at 70 watts with a 1000 Hertz test tone, if I move the mid tone control one click up from the 12 o'clock position, both receivers will clip. Now, if I move the balance to one side and test only that channel, then yes, I can get 92 watts before clipping. But clearly when asked to run both channels the amp simply cannot do 90 watts.
So here are my thoughts/questions:
- Should I continue to restore/rebuild more of this second receiver in hopes that refreshing the amps boards or preamp boards might bring something additional? I probably will anyway with at least one of these receivers, because I am enjoying the rebuild.
- Should I buy new speakers and hope that I don't have the same experience with maybe even more efficent speakers? I probably will anyway, but hate to think about spending 5-6K on speakers only to have them popping when the amp clips.
- Should I buy a separate amp and only use the 2270 as a preamp?
- Is this just vintage audio and I need to lower my expectations.
Maybe it's true...don't meet your heroes.
I have always liked listening to music. I have a whole house audio system, several soundbars/surrounds/subs and even an outdoor system with buried sub for the pool. However shy of the Bowers & Wilkins system in my car, I have never really owned a proper system. So recently while rethinking my home office, I decided that I wanted to get a nice turntable, receiver and speakers. This led me down a rabbit hole of YouTube where I learned that there was a proper vintage audio store in my home town. On my first visit I found myself deciding between a Pioneer SX-1050 and a Marantz 2270. Both units really spoke to me from a vintage look and feel, but I was admittedly persuaded by all the videos praising the 2270 and of course the blue lights. So I plunked down, what I know realized was way to much money and came home with the 2270.
After getting this thing home I immediately started thinking about turntable and speakers. I like the vintage look of the JBL's and the Klipsch Heritage ( Fortes, Heresy, etc.). But before I spent that kind of money, I really wanted the chance to listen to them. So in the meantime I bought a pair of Klipsch RP-600m IIs as a holdover and an Eversolo DMP-A6 Streaming DAC so I could start pushing some music through this receiver. I have Apple Music and Amazon music, both of which allow to play hi-res lossless through the Everysolo natively.
At first I was kind of amazed. I couldn't turn the volume passed a quarter turn and it sounded great. I was reflecting on what the guy at the store told me. That this is 70 vintage watts and that is different than the watts of today...blah blah. I think he used the words face melting with some high efficiency Heresy's. I was thinking maybe there is something to that. haha. Of course what I later found out the hard way was that the DAC was pushing out 2.5 volts into the aux port that has a sensitivity of 180 mV. Essentially really overpowering the preamp. How did I learn this. I learned it one day when the receiver was quite warm from playing for a while and the song Juke Box Hero came on. About mid way through the song gets quite hot and the amp started to clip producing horrible popping noises in the speakers.
After reading a lot and doing some test, I realized I needed to turn down the output db's on the dac to not overload the preamp. I also tried to plug the dac directly into the main in, to skip the Marantz preamp. But honestly none of this really worked great. No matter what I did/do, there always seems to come a time when a certain song just pushes this thing to clip. I even bought a turntable and at just below or at half volume (11 or 12 o'clock) I start to hear the popping in the mid to low range.
At this point many of you might be thinking....
1) This guy is listening to music to loud
2) The speakers are the problem
3) Was this receiver restored, sounds like xyz capacitor, board, transistor needs to be replaced
I am here to tell you that all of the above may be true. But let me continue with part B of this story.
After buying this receiver I did what all good new vintage hobbiest do. I started stalking ebay and marketplace. And to my surprise not three weeks after I bought the 2270, another 2270 shows up on my local marketplace feed. It was certainly dirty and all but one lamp was burnt out, but before I knew it, I was driving 50 minutes to pick it up. This one was going to be a project for me and I paid less than 1/3 of what I paid for the first one. Here is a picture of it on the left. It is dirty!
Now I will not go to deep into the story of this second receiver except to say that I have since completely cleaned it up, replaced all the lamps, rebuilt the power supply board and replaced the main filter capacitors. As you can see this second one was made in '76 (the first one is from '75) and from my eye had never been touched. Amazingly it worked. It was missing the pre-out main in jumpers, the controls were dirty, but otherwise it made great sounds out of both channels. In fact the only thing I really counld find wrong with it was the protection relay would take a good 15-20 seconds to click and the power supply reference voltage for the tuner and such was reading around 12.8 which is lower than the 13.5 to 14.2 or whatever it should be. This is why I decided to rebuilt the power supply. Here is a couple of picutres of it now, still not completely together yet.
And here is the original Capacitors and a picture of this board used to install the new ones.
After these changes the protection relay clicks on in 3-4 seconds and all the reference voltages are in spec. So naturally I decided to do some listening. Guess what, this receiver behaves basically the same way. I thought it must be the speakers or these receivers just cant get as loud as I may want them occasionally. And don't get me wrong it can get loud. But every so often there is a song or two where I want just a touch more and just can't get it without clipping.
Now I promise I will try to wrap this up and fill in more details when/if someone starts asking questions, but for now, one last part of this story. As i tried to get to the bottom of this the scientific part of me kicked in and I bought an oscilloscope. I had read and heard so many people talking about how great these receivers are and how underrated they were where many were showing the units pushing 90 watts. So I had to test. Here is what I can tell you. Both of my receivers are putting out about 71-72 watts before clipping. Worse, at 70 watts with a 1000 Hertz test tone, if I move the mid tone control one click up from the 12 o'clock position, both receivers will clip. Now, if I move the balance to one side and test only that channel, then yes, I can get 92 watts before clipping. But clearly when asked to run both channels the amp simply cannot do 90 watts.
So here are my thoughts/questions:
- Should I continue to restore/rebuild more of this second receiver in hopes that refreshing the amps boards or preamp boards might bring something additional? I probably will anyway with at least one of these receivers, because I am enjoying the rebuild.
- Should I buy new speakers and hope that I don't have the same experience with maybe even more efficent speakers? I probably will anyway, but hate to think about spending 5-6K on speakers only to have them popping when the amp clips.
- Should I buy a separate amp and only use the 2270 as a preamp?
- Is this just vintage audio and I need to lower my expectations.
Maybe it's true...don't meet your heroes.
-- they were right to make continuous/full-spectrum THE number used for the advertised spec -- but they (presumably unintentionally) made peak/dynamic irrelevant (which your example proves quite well that short-term peak is also very relevant).
