Levinson 331 humming followup...


Hi again. I wrote a month and a half ago about the used Levinson 331 i bought off audiogon. It was humming from the RT channel (when looking from rear) when i rec'd it. My last post was that i took it into a local dealer to repair it. I got the amp back after about 3 weeks and the hum was fixed. They replaced a bad filter capacitor on the rt side and did a "complete test". Well, the amp does sound pretty nice but what the tech did NOT do was replace any of the big power capacitors. One of which was leaking and had crusty white stuff like on the top of a car battery terminal. I didn't want to cause trouble as they did take care of my chief complaint, the hum. Believe it or not, A very kind fellow audiogon member here actually lives within 4 miles of me and insisted that we can save $$$ by not sending the unit to Levinson. He figured out the best replacement cap we could buy and replaced all 4 of the large caps. It took us 6 whole hours working as a team but we did it! This amp clearly is clearly built like a tank but it definietely has some design flaws. these design flaws made it hard to work on but not worth the $1200 to $2000 plus shipping the Levinson sites wanted. Now i hope the amp will provide me with listening pleasure for another 10 years. I think the unit is at least 14 to 16 years though but i'll be happy with 10. For those of you that responded to my previous post, the original Levinson large caps were made by Phillips NOT Mallory. The 4 small ones are made by Nippon and had no signs of leakage. We installed Cornell Dublier caps which were recommended by a friend of a friend from Japan. The internet is truly a great place. W/o this site, I would have never been able to learn such things and meet such wonderful people. Thank you.

Cheng
chenglo1

Showing 1 response by samzx12

So Levinson obviously was putting inferior caps on most of the 300 series amps? Wonder what the cost savings was and did they know the Phillips caps were inferior?