This video brings back memories, no so good, of realizing there was a problem with your tuner, having an intuition as to what it was, but feeling frustrated and helpless because you couldn’t fix it, nor did you know anyone could. The voice in your head was taunting, “Ha, ha, your fancy tuning meter is off, and you can’t do anything about it.” It’s enough to make you want to sell the unit (at a loss) just to relieve the pain. Anyway, thank you for removing the mystery obscuring the inner workings of these magnificent, magical, windows into my past.
Another fine job To y!! I have to look back but I think I’ve watched all of your videos. They’re great and I always liked the long ones. A few times I meant to grab my phone so I could comment to let you know I have a Clausing lathe and a Bridgeport mill so I can probably make you new knobs if you ever need. I saw a couple receivers in your past videos that were missing knobs. I think one of the coolest things I made was gears and they came out perfect!
The worst pots ive ever found is in the old Sansui rcvrs like the 800 and the 2000,5000 . The way i did tuners for the first couple years when i started was with a small FM stereo transmitter i made. Now days you can buy a cheap FM transmitter for the car that makes aux input use one of those hooked to your phone with a 400 or 1khz tone to do alignments until you can get an alignment generator .
Thank you for doing this series.. makes me aware to pass this one up, I don't want to work on this particular one :-) I'll stick with the more service friendly series ! Very interesting tuner tips though !!
From a simple multimeter to the FM stereo MPX signal generator, man that escalated quickly! 😮 I need to try this dial alignment method on my tuner. It is off by about 0.2MHz. The shaft is splined but if i move it 1 tooth it might just do the trick…
I've re-aligned many tuners - it is rare to find one that is close to what it should be (talking about sensitivity more than dial accuracy), and in many cases I suspect it left the factory that way. I'm guessing that under the pressures of the assembly line, there just isn't time to extract every last fraction of sensitivity. The worker gets it "close enough" and then it's time to do the next one. Julian Hirsch used to do receiver reviews for Stereo Review, I remember him commenting that manufacturers would likely supply units for testing that had been carefully tweaked by a good bench tech. I can totally believe that, because on these 1970s units it takes a lot of time to spin the dial back and forth over and over, until you get the capacitors and inductors dialed in at each end of the tuning range. One other thing - some manufacturers' service manuals have you tune to an area on the dial with no stations, and adjust the center tuning needle there.
As pins to repair these broken knobs (etc.) I save the shafts of broken .5 - 1.5 mm drill bits. Steel ! They also fit perfect in a drilled hole, how is that possible....
Hi Tony, pls do a video on cassette tape playback and record frequency response, dB output etc, setup, without test tapes, or how to set up a master machine accurately so i can record my own test tapes on a master machine. Great channel. Thks.
It's the silver dial models. Bean-counters got involved and two boards turned into one, then a third board disappeared and was crammed onto the board with the other two. 1977 was the turning point for Marantz. Still sounded good, but the internal design was bastardized.
Tony... can't you open that meter or both meters and paint the needles red that will pop and is really good to see even for daily use you can see the meters really good ..... Every meter should be standard with a colored needle
Tony, what caps do you use? I'm restoring my cassette deck a Technics RS-M270X and want to use the best. Do i go with Rubycon, Panasonic,Nichicon and what is the best in the series.
It depends on where they are. Power supply or signal path? Any good brand name has quality parts. Look up each manufacturers electrolytic application chart. Also. When you look them up on mouser, it will have a link for the series. Click on that and it will give you a good idea of application.
Thank you for bringing me back to my youth, where my sister (English Major, now Lawyer for 40 years), Mother (retired computer programmer, 91 years young) and Grandmother (who was a school teacher and graduated from college at age 18 and lived way before her time) all tried unsuccessfully to correct my grammar. As I said to them: nobody goes to English class anymore anyways, because its always too crowded there. They, along with Yogi Berra will always hold a special place in my heart. Thanks for trying, and thanks for the comment! :)-)