Sony TA-F440E (F540E) amplifier with mysterious faults and a history. 

I suspect the original fault was a manufacturing defect, but we may never know. There certainly was a past ... erm.. person involved here, who was out of his/her depth.

I'm no lover of schematic mistakes eather, they have sent me mentally spinning in circles a few times over the years. Out comes the correction pencil.

Years ago I ditched a working one of those. I regret that now.

There's a clue in the video. Every so often you hear my watch chime the hours. I edited down 3 hours of video and did about another hour without the camera.

In this case the capacitors are relatively low voltage because it has a linear power supply. Generally I discharge capacitors with a resistor of a few hundred ohms or so. I don't like to see sparks when discharging capacitors.

A Tascam 4-track cassette Portastudio? I've been looking for one of those at a sensible price, since now I have an Alesis HD24 multitrack digital audio recorder I could connect it to. Let me know if you come across another.

hi it john he the one who doing all the spare for the portastudio's i know this man i am on first names i know this plans it's all go news yes you know the name by now this is why the prices gone high john's got some that need work you could get one of him and fix it up in a video and do 15 min video's pt 1 -2 would get the money in not a lot tp lose john got 40 of them i talk to john 5-10 time a week a lot watch video's on them i checked

@@bobjerome5390 Alas I don't make any money from RU-vid, but it would be interesting to do one up. If you come across one that's sensibly priced, please send me an email via my web site.

I'm not sure you can make such a sweeping statement. Sony had the professional video market sewn up for decades, due to excellent quality, ease of maintenance and after-sales support. Every time JVC or Panasonic tried to enter the professional video market, it all unravelled very quickly. MII format for example, or DVCPRO.

@@video99couk "Sony had the professional video market sewn up for decades" with broadcast cameras that fell to bits because you looked at them. 1980 Bought a CCDV100E - great camera. Tape deck died on it. Power amp speakers & tuner. Amp now iffy, Tuner lost the plot, speakers ok. CCDV500E (2nd hand) Dodgy power switch, tape guide fell out of the deck. EVS800 x2 both faulty. One was returned twice to shop for repair 'as new' - it's still not fixed following Sony's collection from my house following a letter to Akio Morita at the time. Nothing Panasonic of an expensive nature has failed at all. Sony stuff is a joke.

That thought crossed my mind when I saw that "110 degrees CRT" label. Up to that point I thought it was probably the previous owner had bodged it up.