Old SS amps
What are people's experiences with old SS amps. And I'm talking old like close to 20 years. I guess this can be called vintage(though to me it's yesterday.)
Either you bought it new and have had it that long or you bought it used.
Is buying it used a really bad idea even though it was owned by one person with no service issues? Like an old Pass.
I hear something about capacitators needing to be replaced. Should it be avoided like the plague? Am very interested in one but don't want to be stuck with a cat in a sack.
Thanks for any thoughts.
Often manufacturers would glue caps to the PCB. Although you'd like to think they did this for the sake of microphonics, the glue was there to hold the components in place while they were being soldered. Sometimes with age and heat that glue kind of decomposes and spreads out over the PCB from under the cap. For all the world it looks like the cap is leaking, but it's not, it's just glue. Not that glue is necessarily benign: in rare cases it becomes conductive and causes short-circuits. |
+1 That's exactly how I look at it. Giving great gear a new lease on life is worth the while in my opinion. Congrats on refurbishing your PC5002M, these are gorgeous amps! |
@emergingsoul sadly there is no variac for wine! 😁 |
Around the mid ’80’s Bob Carver made some very good sounding amplifiers with an unusual and very light power supply. He challenged critics to hear any difference between his M1.0 and an expensive high-end tube amp (forgot which one) - and he proved his point- they couldn’t hear a difference. Only down side: A little bit of fan noise, but in a home system where these will be barely whispering, you can easily disconnect the fan, like I did with mine, running the woofers in a bi-amped system. Marc Stager |
