Studer A730 cd player problem

[charzoom]

Hi!

I have just bought a Studer A730 cd player and while checking the internals I noticed there is something different about the brand of chips used inside this CD player.



As you can see from the photo attachments, there are a lot of “Portugal” brand chips in place of what should have been “Philips” brand chips.

Should I assume this Studer A730 has been heavily modified? If so, for better or worse?

The serial number of this Studer A730 is 2XXX.

Appreciate any help and advice!

 

[lini]

(...) there are a lot of “Portugal” brand chips (...)

Seems like you didn't spot the logo. That's not "Portugal" brand - that's Texas Instruments, made at their fab in Portugal. So no reason to worry, I'd say.

Greetings from Munich!

Manfred / lini

 

[Moving Ahead]

From an internet image search the tda1541 is located under the board with the transformers. Along with the crappy Phillips Ecaps.
I'm really surprised to see your image of the player. I've never seen a IC gathering of this magnitude.

 

[BillWojo]

If your having issues, reseat all the IC. Looks like they are all socketed.

BillWojo

 

[lini]

(...) I've never seen a IC gathering of this magnitude.

Oh, that's not that much of a surprise. I.e., one needs to consider, that the A730 is a broadcast model with quite a few extra/special features compared to a regular CD player. So quite a custom design - and one from the 80s, which could hardly be expected to sell in as large quantities as regular consumer models, at that. Hence it wouldn't have made sense to cast its functions/capabilities into some sort of highly integrated chip-set, and so these were implemented with the then available standard ICs instead.

And to me it wouldn't look any worse than quite a few of the old full-AT-sized x86 PC mainboards (e.g. DTK PEM-2000 et cetera...), anyway. Still loads of "glue logic" on those...

Greetings from Munich!

Manfred / lini

 

[charzoom]

thanks for the replies, guys! Looks like lini is indeed correct about the Texas Instrument ICs. I spoke with an experienced hifi equipment technician today and was told Studer did in fact sourced some of the ICs from Texas Instruments other than Philips for some Studer A730 models. No more need to worry!