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Markoneswift system thread

Markoneswift

Markoneswift

Quartz locked n ready to rock
I keep making these system posts and then not updating them, so this is an attempt to keep everything under one thread regarding my system as a whole.

At the moment, the system is....

Technics SL-QL1 turntable
Yamaha R-S700 receiver
Technics RS-BX707 cassette deck
Arcam Alpha 5 CD
Mission 707 speakers
Apple Airport Express for streaming / DAC
 
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Love the Yamaha series! I had an R-S500 myself which I traded for a Marantz, only because different flavor. I can see myself going back to a Yamaha amp though in the future. Bang for the buck, you can't do much, if any, better.
 
stuck limo said:
Love the Yamaha series! I had an R-S500 myself which I traded for a Marantz, only because different flavor. I can see myself going back to a Yamaha amp though in the future. Bang for the buck, you can't do much, if any, better.
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Agreed, love the Yamaha amp. It's well built, totally reliable and sounds great.
 
As you can see from my present system, I seem to be gravitating towards 80's hifi in a big way ! This is not deliberate, but try as I might those high end 'vintage' (aka 70's silver face) components seem to elude me. It really does emphasise though that not all black is crap. It does annoy me a bit when some pundits bang about BPC - I know black plastic was (and still is) a curse of the hifi world but there are lots and lots of absolute gems that aren't silver. Likewise, I've had a few silver face units pass through my possession over the last 12 months and generally they were poor. Admittedly they were not 'high end' units (such as a Pioneer SX-880 and a JVC KD55 cassette deck) but they looked lovely. The problem was, they were just 'blah' - the black face gear I have now blows them away.....
 
I'm adding some more stuff to my systems this week. I'll be keeping as much of what I'm up to as possible in this thread. I'm adding a Technics SA-103 with a dead channel to the family, as well as welcoming back (!!) my old Sharp VZ-3000 'both sides play upright linear tracking boombox' and my weird, unique Harrison S200 70's vintage amp. I'll be working, time permitting, on all three of these units over the next few months and posting my progress here.

The Technics amp is a bit of an unknown and I will have to start with the basics in that one.
The Sharp VZ-3000 has been dismantled partly by me and totally by the guy who bought it off me. He's an electronics engineer though, so he's kept everything together and has traced the problem of no sound output to a fault in the EQ board. My plan for more or less the whole unit is to replace all electrolytic caps as a minimum and then see where we go.
The Harrison S200 is a 'boutique' amplifier with no known schematics available for it. It has one channel working, one dead. It's been extensively worked on in the past so I'm probably putting this one to the bottom of the pile for now, although it is SUPER cool :-)
 
I got the Sharp and the Harrison back yesterday, so my initial plan is to run a 1Khz tone into the Sharp through the AUX input and attempt to trace it through the various boards and switches with my oscilloscope. It's my first try using the scope to diagnose a fault, so I will post my progress as I learn.
 
There is some great black plastic stuff. Much of it isn't plastic. I came across a local listing for a Yamaha RX-1100u a couple months back and after reading up on it I realized it was probably a great deal. Sure enough it was fantastic sounding and had great controls etc. I needed another receiver like I need a hole in my head so instead of it just collecting dust I passed it on to another member here. It now resides in New York City!
 
Certainly not all black gear is plastic, and certainly not all of it is crap. Far from it. The black Sansui gear from the 1970s is absolutely awesome, as was the G.A.S., SAE and Soundcraftsmen gear - to name a few.

Here's my bedroom black rack:

Black_Rack.jpg


All black, no plastic and no crap.

I also agree with you about the 1980s gear. I think it currently represents the best bang for the buck in used audio. It doesn't have the same vintage look the collectors and hipsters crave. So, it flies under the radar and you can get some incredible bargains at you local thrift stores on on craigslist. It just isn't old enough to be cool - yet.

Ironically, my That 80s System is silver, but not the classic silver of the 1970s with lots of knobs and analog meters. It's lots of buttons and LEDs. Again, not as cool as the 70s gear, but also not nearly as expensive:

Silver_System_5.jpg


All bought at Goodwill, all for pennies on the dollar. You'll notice the heart of that system is a silver Yamaha A-1000 integrated amp. I'm a big fan of the Yamaha gear from that era. Great sound, great features and very affordable. And, if you prefer, the A-1000 also came in black:

yamaha_a-1000_front_panel.jpg
 
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The VZ has been a bit of a mission so far ! At least I was (sort of) correct about my troubleshooting skills having improved since I had it last. I've now replaced the amp IC and all the electrolytic capacitors on the amp driver board and the unit sounds MUCH better now. I'm getting a few millivolts DC at the outputs now rather than 30 volts so that's an improvement ! I've discovered the tape deck woks and sounds good and the aux input also sounds fine. I still have an issue with slight hum in the right channel when the balance is shifted over to the left though, so I would like to track that down. I get nothing from FM Stereo on the tuner (but that could be due to no antenna !) and I have no life from the record player (although it needs a couple of belts before it will do anything anyway).

I found during my rummaging around that the power supply has been fitted with 3300uf caps which is contradictory to the service manual where 4700uf caps are specified. Not too sure what to make of this, I might replace them with 4700 units as they look quite old and are not even a matching pair. I also discovered the main power switch has a cracked solder joint underneath it and a quite impressive arc can be seen if the switch leg is not fully in contact with the board !!! I may, or may not, re-cap the tone board too - it's hard wired through to other boards and although it is quite easy to lift up it is much harder to remove it for working on comfortably.
 
MCM_Fan said:
the 1980s gear. I think it currently represents the best bang for the buck in used audio. It doesn't have the same vintage look the collectors and hipsters crave. So, it flies under the radar and you can get some incredible bargains at you local thrift stores on on craigslist. It just isn't old enough to be cool - yet.
Ironically, my That 80s System is silver, but not the classic silver of the 1970s with lots of knobs and analog meters. It's lots of buttons and LEDs. Again, not as cool as the 70s gear, but also not nearly as expensive:
Click to expand...
Stark - that's a great sigil :king:

MCM - love the gear on your pics, especially your "bedroom black rack"!

But you have the wrong perspective in this quote of yours above.
It's not about "vintage look", what "collectors and hipsters crave", what is "incredible bargains", what's "old enough" or not old enough, what's "cool" and what will be cool, what is silver and what is black, what has "lots of knobs" and what has "buttons and LEDs"...

Generally, 1970's gear usually does look better than the 1980's gear (that's subjective, but most would agree) and is usually (or at least more often) of better build quality than the 1980's gear (that's not subjective).
But even that is not the main issue.
It should be about the best sound - achieved through the best parts inside and the smartest solutions, the best layouts of audio components.
There was a short period in Japan, approximately 1977-1981, when the engineers run the show, they made the decisions in production of audio components. That's why the gear from that period has amazing qualities (and usually it was still affordable): Hitachi, Onkyo, Sony... In the 1980's, managers and marketing took over. And then everything went downhill.
Sure, from early 1980's till today you can still get top quality products, as good or even better as was the best gear that came out from Japan in those few mentioned years - but NOT at those prices anymore. The prices went up and the quality went down.
 
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