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SANSUI AU-517 Recap & Restoration?

In conclusion, I had Electric City Repair do the work on my Sansui and I'm extremely happy I did. The amp sounds better (a little clearer and significant improvement in the bass), it looks better and the price ended up being very reasonable. They also gave me a bag of all the caps they replaced which I felt was a nice touch. I would eagerly recommend Electric City Repair to anyone in the Denver/Boulder metro area who's looking for vintage audio and repair. Great job. Thanks so much Eric.

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Another thing to consider is the difficulty of an amplifier to work on. I had a 517 years ago with a problem with the protect circuit. getting to the relevant board was a real bastard - especially when you need to dissemble & reassemble several times to find faults - event tho that may not be occurring in this case - doing it once each time is enough.....

This is compared to working on stuff like the 555, or 555a, or even the 999 - where the large boards are more accessible from underneath, or can be removed from their own slots.
 
slimecity said:
Another thing to consider is the difficulty of an amplifier to work on. I had a 517 years ago with a problem with the protect circuit. getting to the relevant board was a real bastard - especially when you need to dissemble & reassemble several times to find faults - event tho that may not be occurring in this case - doing it once each time is enough.....

This is compared to working on stuff like the 555, or 555a, or even the 999 - where the large boards are more accessible from underneath, or can be removed from their own slots.
Click to expand...

Actually, apart from the Power Supply / Protection board (a bit of a PITA to recap/repair), the rest of the boards are pretty easy to access. The 2 driver boards you can easily unplug to gain access. The Tone board - no sweat. Even the Phono board is alright to recap (except for 2 little caps at the bottom) without faceplate/shaft disassembly.
 
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Btw, I recapped most of the caps (save 2 non-polarized - which measured ok - on the Power board, 2 on the Phono board which were also good...so were left on). Even the 4 big power caps (12,000uF) were replaced for some 15,000 uF 63v United Chemicon caps. Finally, the old caps must've dried a whole lot since they were measuring only about 8,000uF !! Now, bass has remarkably changed - a lot more presence...especially deep bass. Could be my subjective impression but the soundstage seems much wider and more defined, detailed.

To those who just try to clean the contacts on their old 24vdc relay....ok short-term solution but the static will come back soon enough. So, I replaced mine with a brand-new modern one. A bunch of 2sc1400's and 2sa750's were also systematically replaced as I've seen on other forums of their reliability issues.
 
$480 is a very good price. Having restored one of these myself, it's a very time consuming job.
 
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