What the Hello Dolly is this mess ?

mrbigbluelight

On Ebay: Sansui 1000A tube receiver

FOR BID IS THIS TUBE SANSUI 1000A RECEIVER. VERY NICE COSMETICS. THIS WAS SANSUI'S VERY LAST AND THE MOST ADVANCED TUBE RECEIVER. 40 W PER CHANNEL! MISSING ARE 3 KNOBS. I POWERED IT ON AND GOT NOTHING. THOUGHT I FOUND THE PROBLEM BECAUSE THE FUSE WAS BAD AND REPLACED IT, BUT STILL NOTHING. THIS IS ALL I CAN DO. WELCOME TO COME AND TAKE A LOOK SEE. 50 M NORTH OF NYC. WEST POINT AREA, BEAR MT, JUST OFF RT 9W. GREAT RESTO PROJECT PIECE! YOU PAY EXACT SHIPPING CHARGE BY LOCATION, I PACK CAREFULLY AND FREE. NO INFLATED SHIPPING CHARGES, OR HIDDEN FEES, EVER! (7/13) I TRIED ANOTHER FUSE AND IT POWERED ON FOR A SECOND AND THE FUSE BLEW. I REMOVED THE BOTTOM PLATE AND FOUND WHAT MIGHT BE THE PROBLEM. A BLOWN CAPACITTOR?


I like looking at Ebay at vintage Sansui gear; not much of a hobby, but what the heck, it's cheap.
So, I come across this Sansui tube receiver, guy has a pic with the bottom removed, and ....... :eek:

Let me rephrase that .... :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek:

What kind of warped, dyslexic electronic layout is that ? Is that how this unit left the factory ?!?!
I got chills just looking at all the cold solder joints !

So ... did Sansui put out this kind of manufacturing on some of their gear ?

Did I mention ...... :eek:

PS: before you ask, no, I'm not thinking of bidding on this. Just curious.

danger boy

MrBBL,

yeah that's old school.. thats what the guts of them vintage receivers looked like back then. a rats nest.. but it worked. that was before circuit boards of course.

engtaz

Advance PCB (printed circuit board) 2 layers, top and bottom foils. LOL Don't want a wire scrap floating around in there. Cold solder joint were a problem though.

mhardy6647

I cannot see the quality of the soldering; the photo's too blurry.
Yes that's factory stock and not atypical of Japanese SOTA (state of the art) in the 1960's. BTW, all of the stock, oil-filled coupling caps will be bad in that 1000A and will need to be replaced.

In New England, the savvy tube guys buy 1000A's cheap and gut them for the excellent quality output transformers. I bought a working, re-capped 1000A a couple of years ago, but don't have the heart to gut it. They were decent enough receivers.

As a point of comparison, here is the output section of an Allied (Knight) 333 AM/FM stereo receiver that I restored for a friend a while ago. It's of about the same vintage as the Sansui, but lower powered (ca. 8 wpc from push-pull 6BM8's). This is a rebadged Pioneer SX-34; built by Pioneer for Allied. This one's fairly neat below decks, but awfully, awfully cramped. Tiny fingers must've built it! I was hampered in choice of coupling caps by the space constraint. I ended up using some very small Panasonic caps sourced from Mouser or Digikey.



You can compare the Sansui & Pioneer with a couple of higher-end offerings (US-made, but also more expensive).

Here's a Fisher 400 (7868 push-pull stereo, pretty comparable to the Sansui but FM only):
These are a pleasure to work on, and to listen to! This one's been recapped and had some other minor updates:




And here's a Marantz 8B integrated (prior to restoration). Absolutely beautiful in every respect!

reeltrouble1

Crikey, some new pictures, way to go Hardy....

Nice shots BTW.

RT1

mhardy6647

Actually I think I posted all of them on the "show me your a$$" thread :-P

I can show you the "after" shot of the 8B if you want. I fell for that amp in a big way after working on one and listening to it for a while on my Cornwalls! I am sort of passively looking for a restorable one for myself...

mrbigbluelight

Thanks for those pics .... amazing.

My memory must be bad, but I used to take the backs off everything just to look, and I can't recall seeing that level of construction. Sure, back then there were no dual layer PCBs, but pegboard level construction would look better than that.

Interesting stuff.