Technics SE 9600P Power Amplifier - Can Beat Pioneer Marantz Sansui. Repair Restoration Testing

my name's chris and i repair my own audio equipment and i also show you how to repair yours so let's get started [Music] techniques sc 9600 power amplifier was discarded as trash not happening on my watch join me as i take you through the repair restoration and the recovery of this beautiful iconic techniques power amplifier [Music] not every piece of equipment that i have is in mint condition but i treat each of them with respect each of them can still continue on for decades even if they will never look like new pieces of equipment and i treat all of my equipment the same way this 9600 received the exact same treatment as if it came brand new out of the box it doesn't matter to me i'm going to treat it the same way i'm going to change out those electrolytic capacitors that need to be changed out after 45 years i'm going to clean it up a little bit i'll end up putting it into my system and listening to it and it just deserves that and i'm sure that even though this amplifier will never look perfect it will sound perfect by the time i'm done with it before i can listen to it i've got to get it up on the test bench but before i get it up on the test bench i'm going to have to go in there and restore it and you guys know me the first thing i'm going to do is take a look at this unit before i power it up so let's get started if you haven't already please subscribe this 9600s faceplate was a pretty big mess a lot of dirt on it a lot of scrapes somebody had apparently scraped in their name into the face plate why anybody would do that i don't know that's a first for me the back is a mess a little bit of corrosion uh just uh pitted some i live in florida so that could explain it same with looking down from the top uh it's missing one cover there's a little bit of surface rust in there under the bottom this shows the unit sitting up on an end i removed the bottom cover doesn't look like anybody's been in there it actually looks pretty clean but one thing i did find in there was a screw and this is why i look at these units you never know what you're going to find you want that screw in there when i power this up probably not and actually i never did find where that screw came from i'm really not sure but i one thing i am sure of i'm glad i got it out of there before i powered uh powered it up before showing you more of this techniques sc 9600 repair and restoration which included changing out those old electrolytic capacitors setting up the amplifier and bench testing it right now i just wanted to go over the specifications of this amplifier and a couple unique features about it that most amplifiers don't have first of all it's 110 watts a channel into eight ohms uh it's 165 into four ohms it's like any of the middle 70s amplifiers now this was built from 74 to 1980 this particular amp i mean it it's just weighs a ton 50 60 pounds you know whatever you drop it on it's gonna break not it but whatever it hits is going to break it it just is um built just built in a way that uh it's still here after all these years so the unique features with this particular unit one it has yeah i've got the face plate off see if i can show you this i don't know well anyway you can kind of see the face plate ah it's got right here something called output impedance and it's a four position switch click click click click click and i looked at it and what is output impedance and and the four selections are normal 0.08 ohms then the other one is 0.8 ohms the next one is 2.7 ohms and the next one is 8 ohms well what that is is your damping factor you can adjust the damping factor to your speakers will that affect the sound well i'm going to find out because i'll give it a try and see if it makes any difference usually you have a specification for an amplifier in your owner's manual or in the service manual it'll say damping factor minimum blah whatever it happens to be this one you can adjust it so that's that's unique to any power amplifier i have anyway so that's kind of unique i i don't know if it you know what it's going to do for me but i'm going to have to uh give it a try and see see if it works if it works it works if it don't it don't uh but that was a little bit unusual another thing unusual is i don't know if you guys can see maybe you can maybe you can't right here and right here on these two heat sinks there's a little yellow dot and what the heck's this yellow dot well when these heat sinks become 122 degrees fahrenheit or 50 degrees celsius for you folks who are somewhere else in the world in the us this will turn orange now it doesn't shut the amp off because really those temperatures frankly are not very high they sound pretty high if you were sitting in a room at 122 degrees fahrenheit right but to this thing it's not going to shut off or anything but it's just kind of a warning that this is kind of warm now this is going to feel warm to you i don't think you know it's going to burn you but you know this could get substantially hotter than 122 degrees fahrenheit so that was kind of unique they put a little dot that changes that changes uh color when the uh amplifier's temperature increases so that was pretty interesting uh really the rest of it is is pretty oh another thing too unlike my spec 2 i was going to tell you my pioneer spec 2 i just did a video on that you guys know that not too long ago and on the spec one and i was mentioning that the spec 2 just has one set of speaker outputs this unit has two sets of speaker outputs it has an a and a b well actually they call it i think they call it a main and a remote but same idea it does have two sets of uh speaker hookups in the back so that's good and you've got switches here at the front again i'll show you here on uh yeah i don't know if you can see it but there's right here this is where the buttons would be there's a main remote and uh everything else is pretty convenient it does have three different um meter ranges sensitivity ranges again this is the front panel of course you'd have buttons there so if you want to see the meters work a little bit more see a little bit more deflection at lower power you can set it to something more sensitive there uh what else on here is anything it's got level controls which is nice that's not unusual for a power amp but it's got them uh it's got a there's another thing that's kind of interesting here's something called input on and off all right input on and off um what that does is disconnect the amplifier's inputs so that you can supposedly you can go ahead let's say you want to hook another preamp up you don't have to turn it off would i do that probably not but that's the idea you disconnect the inputs here so you don't plug in you know normally you'd never do that go ahead and plug something like that into your live power amp or preamp right you turn it off you hook up the cables uh but this one supposedly you can disconnect it and go ahead and hook it up without damaging anything am i gonna try that one probably not this is a long video and i put chapters into this video time codes and some of you all may know how that works some of you may not but on a video like this one that's two plus hours long you may not want to watch it all i hope you do hope you want to watch it from beginning to end but you may not want to so i've put chapters into this video and hopefully giving you some descriptions of what those chapters contain so what you do when you're at the videos hit that show more button and scroll down and down right at the bottom you're going to see where i put time codes in and then there's chapters that correlate to those time codes you can also use the timeline there's a timeline here right at the bottom of where the video is running and you can see along here those same chapters that i just showed you down below and you can just click on those and go straight to them you may notice there's a little space in between each of these chapters there's a little gap and all you got to do is click on that area i just wanted to tell you about that just so you guys know so you don't have to waste your time looking for something after looking over the sc 9600 i didn't see any reason not to power it up the only thing i had found earlier was that screw in the bottom of the chassis so i took a variac and i slowly increased the power to the 9600 and i worked my way all the way up to 120 volts and i saw no indication that the amplifier was on the power lamp was not illuminated the two meter assemblies were not illuminated so my first thought was well maybe i've got a power supply problem i've got some kind of issue because normally you'll get one or two of these bulbs burned out but not usually all of them in a piece of equipment now this piece of equipment only has three different lighting assemblies so come to find out all three of them were burned out so that's one thing you gotta keep in mind too from time to time when you power these up this is an unusual situation but not unheard of actually the amplifier powered up but because i had no visual of it being powered up all those lights were burned out it had me thinking i had a problem which i didn't even though this is a very rough looking amplifier i'm going to work on it just as hard as if it were meant out of the box that's me i work on the lesser pieces just as hard and matter of fact a lot of times these type of units that are in this kind of shape are more rewarding to get going i'm not going to try to refinish it or make it look perfect because it'll never be perfect but there's no reason why this amplifier i hope will not operate and be just as reliable as if it were a mint uh sc9600 coming out of the box it was not a scratch on it there's no reason why this amplifier can't work properly for decades to come so after i determined that the amplifier it actually powered up and just the lamps were burned out i went ahead and i hooked up a pair of speakers to the 9600 along with a cd player i just ran the cd outputs right straight into the rca inputs of the amp and used the uh the level controls on the amp as a volume control and it worked fine i mean it sounded good uh the meters were operating even though those bulbs were burnt out and everything seemed good to proceed so my next step is to get in there and to figure out what bulbs i need to get the meter assemblies back illuminated along with the uh power indicator i'll say it again always go to hifiengine.com and download the service manual for whatever piece of equipment you're working on the schematic for this sc 9600 is contained in the service manual so the schematic indicates that the meter lamps are 6.3 volt and the power lamp is a 7.5 volt and now i will have to do some research and run those down and after doing some research i found the meter lamps available on ebay the power lamp i'm going to replace that with an led the meter lamps are a little bit more difficult to replace as they are inside the sealed meters it's not like there's a little socket on the outside where you can just plug this new bulb into you have to remove the case the plastic case around the meter and then you have to unsolder the old bulb and install the new bulb now once you do this you know this most likely is going to last another 40 years they won't have to be replaced very often but they are a little bit of a pain to replace right because you got to take the unit apart you got to take the meters apart you worry about slipping or damaging those meters so you got to be really careful when you take these meters apart that you're careful with them they're very delicate the power lamp i used an led as i indicated and that was the easiest thing to do and that was easy to get at and easy to replace so now we've got both meter lamps working and we've got the power lamp working so now the unit looks a little bit better looks like it should right all lit up i don't find it very hard to convince most people to change out their burned out bulbs in their vintage audio equipment most people would like everything to be illuminated like it was when it was brand new the hard thing to convince people at least some people is to replace the old electrolytic capacitors in vintage equipment so i i do repeat myself somewhat because i think it's very important the most important component in vintage audio equipment to get replaced are those electrolytic capacitors that's where the majority of your failures are going to occur and so again i'm going to talk about the electrolytic capacitors and why you should change them and it's not because i think they should be changed it's because of the manufacturers of electrolytic capacitors say they should be changed how long do they go it's hard to say but most of the manufacturers say 15 to 20 years under normal operating conditions you should expect to get out of a capacitor i've seen some electrolytic capacitors that literally did blow up this is a capacitor from an akai open reel deck that just exploded all over the place this capacitor is a filter capacitor from a pioneer integrated amplifier and it had started to leak got down inside the chassis and just really made a mess that was probably leaking for years in addition i had a sony integrated amplifier where the capacitor blew the artwork right off the board took out a couple other transistors so sometimes these capacitors will fail spectacularly most of the time you're not going to see failures like that where it blows off pieces of artwork and there's goop all over your chassis they're just going to fail slowly and over time they deteriorate and you've just got to make your own minds up is that important is it important to have the best sound quality you can have in addition to the sound quality and as i indicated earlier what i think is more important reliable that you can turn this piece of equipment on and know it's going to operate and it'll probably operate for decades more with some fresh electrolytics in it as i mentioned we can't be 100 sure the transistors and diodes and resistors and the rest of the components in it but you're getting rid of the majority of the problems when you decide to go in there and replace those old electrolytic capacitors now i'm going to work through all of the assemblies in this techniques sc 9600 including the power supply and the two driver assemblies i'm also going to reseat all the power transistors and install new mica insulators as well as new thermal compound after that i'm going to take it up on the test bench do idle current and dc offset adjustments and then run it through its paces and just see what this amplifier can do before i start the restoration i want to share with you a little bit about the history of the panasonic corporation and specifically about their hi-fi history you don't see a whole lot about panasonic or techniques so i want to share a little bit of that with you before i start the restoration in about two minutes i'm going to show you a video that panasonic created in 2013 about their company history it's a really great video to see but before that i want to talk about specifically about how they came up with the name panasonic and also how they came about to come up with the name of techniques those two things were not covered in the video and so this is about a techniques power amplifier the sc9600 so i thought it was important to add those two details about how they came up with the panasonic name and also how they came up with the techniques name the panasonic brand was created by mesusta in 1955 for the united states because the brand that they sold under for the most part in japan which was called the national brand was already taken in the united states by a variety of different companies so they had to come up with another name for the united states market and what they came up with was a brand name that was created from two different words one was pan meaning universal and the other word was sonic meaning sound so the idea was for pan and sonic to go together and it would have a meaning of bringing sound that their company would create for the world so panasonic was born out of those two words now the techniques brand we got to go even deeper don't we we've got masusta uh creating panasonic and after the panasonic brand came the techniques brand which was used for panasonic's hi-fi audio systems and that started in 1965. the first product that had the techniques name was a speaker system so the question is the the name techniques how did they come up with techniques what was coined from the word technology and the idea was that technology meaning that it faithfully reproduces the original sounds and they felt it symbolized panasonic's commitment to the creation of high quality audio i would like to bend in these rooms when they're coming up with names i bet they came up with all kinds of combinations koreshot masousta founded panasonic in japan in the early 1900's and the following is a video that was created by panasonic in 2013 that shows the history of the company [Music] the founder of panasonic was born in 1894 in wakayama the youngest child of a wealthy farming family when he was four his father lost the family property as a result of ill-fated speculation on the rice exchange at the age of nine konosuke was obliged to leave home to take up an apprenticeship in osaka as an apprentice konosuke learned the basics of business observing streetcars in osaka he sensed the arrival of an age of electricity so at 15 he joined an electric power company as an extension to his work he dedicated himself to the improvement of light sockets when only 23 konosuke founded a company to manufacture plugs and sockets of his own design together with his wife and brother-in-law panasonic was born [Music] working late into the night konosuke tirelessly strived to improve electrical fittings he introduced a series of new products offering high quality at low prices and started hiring additional staff [Music] in those days the composition of molded components was never released to employees valuing harmony among his staff konosuke revealed the secret for the growth of each individual after spending half a year day and night konosuke finally succeeded in development of an innovative bullet-shaped bicycle lamp despite his confidence it did not sell well leading to excess inventory konosuke then hit upon the idea of offering retailers free samples to demonstrate the lamps this proved successful and orders began to come in [Music] konosuke next designed a square shaped battery lamp and introduced it with the national brand name for the first time for the next 80 years national would attract widespread popularity [Music] konosuke published various materials to strengthen ties with retailers and employees these initiatives reflected his philosophy of participative management with collective wisdom rapidly growing to 300 employees the company's management approach began to significantly affect distributors operations konosuke began raising awareness of his company's mission to exist for the benefit of society he established the basic management objective explicitly acknowledging corporate social responsibilities this year also marked the onset of the great depression whose ripple effects halved the company's sales konosuke's response cut production by half but don't dismiss a single employee we are going to pay the same wages but employees need to commit to selling inventory encouraged by these words employees succeeded in eliminating the excess inventory within two months konosuke visited a temple and was impressed by everyone cheerfully and enthusiastically going about their tasks [Music] he realized that religions are committed to the sacred task of guiding people out of suffering and into happiness our business in producing life's necessities is sacred konosuke spoke before his employees the mission of the manufacturer is to banish poverty by producing an abundant supply of goods are making them available at affordable prices it requires 250 years to fulfill this mission our mission is sublime and far-reaching he then read out the president's declaration the employees were all struck by the mission's loftiness and the plan's grandeur this ceremony marked the establishment of the corps of panasonic's management philosophy konosuke designated this year as the first year of meichi or awareness of the corporate mission next konosuke established the principles then he set up the basic internal rules no matter how large our company might become in the future maintain the attitude of being a humble merchant think of yourself as being employed in a small shop be simple frugal and humble as you carry out your work this discipline has been handed down to all who work for panasonic today as the product range was being expanded konosuke divided its business by product this gave birth to the company's unique division system the aim was to strengthen autonomous management and to develop capable management personnel began to feel strongly that a company is its people [Music] 30 odd years ago i used to tell young employees do you know what you should say when a client asks you what we make at our company you should say that we make people and beyond that we also make electrical appliances the company established its own trading company and products were exported not only to asia but also to europe three people were sent on an inspection tour to the united states and europe for six months the company sought to achieve further development by learning from the world driven by its unique corporate spirit panasonic entered a new phase of rapid growth world war broke out as the conflict intensified the company was obliged to dedicate its facilities to military productions the day after japan surrendered konosuke announced his desire to restart normal business operations however the company's business was severely restricted under the control of the allied powers and panasonic's operations went into the red the five-year post-war period was the harshest time in the company's history in 1950 the japanese economy began to recover konosuke then directed his attention to the west he made his first trip to the united states konosuke became convinced that a technical tie-up with an advanced corporation was essential and established a joint venture company [Music] the japanese market began to experience a boom of electrical appliances rapidly opening new factories the company expanded its business by leaps and bounds ahead of japanese competitors the company started overseas operations the company established its first post-war overseas sales company in the usa construction of overseas factories began with the commissioning of a factory in thailand the rapid expansion of its overseas business attracted international attention [Music] as the japanese economy entered a recession sal's companies and distributors were forced into the red konosuke called them to a conference then age 69 konosuke remained standing on the podium for 13 hours listening to their complaints on the third day konosuke began apologizing and promised to implement reforms he took a lead role in reforming the distribution [Music] i think it is intolerable to stay in a condition without progress for years on end i think we have to bring out higher management and superior products i feel keen responsibility for innovations now an oil crisis struck worldwide konosuke expressed his view in times of recession while some complain about the bad economy i simply seek out work that we can attend to the worst the economy the greater the need to keep working panasonic has advanced as a company because whenever it faces economic adversity it maintains internal solidarity konosuke matsushita passed away at the age of 94. his activities rooted in an open mind and a sense of humility were not limited to corporate management he also called on the japanese government to establish a set of ideals his philosophy of humanity life and management which was rooted in a profound reflection continues to exert an influence on the world to this day successive presidents have continuously passed down the management philosophy reawaken the excitement felt at that foundation anniversary ceremony held in 1932 bring back that sense of passion that strong will and a philosophy deeply rooted in the desire to contribute to the prosperity of society and human happiness starting anew every day panasonic's quest for innovation never ends [Music] the first thing i did before starting the restoration on this sc 9600 was to go to hifieng.com and download the service manual the service manual is going to have all the information you need to adjust restore or repair a vintage piece of audio equipment and hifiengine.com is free you just have to set up an account and then you can download the manuals whether you have an sc9600 or any other piece of equipment so i bring that up often because it's a great resource that's free in today's world you wouldn't have been able to get this information years ago unless you were a service center and now it's all out there on the internet you can sit with your cup of coffee and you can download the manuals you need to keep your vintage equipment going so hifi engine.com is your first stop for anybody who has a vintage piece of stereo equipment that they want to keep running the service manual will have information on how to check and how to adjust the dc offset as well as the idle current of the amplifier and in addition with output meters it'll also have a procedure on how you can check and adjust the alignment of those without the service manual you would know how to do this and with the service manual i think many of you will find that it's really not very difficult to do what the service manual also provides are circuit board layouts within in this case within the 9600 and these are so helpful when you're restoring or repairing a piece of equipment because it easily identifies each component within that circuit board this shows the regulated power supply which they call the power source circuit board and indicates all the positions of all of the components on the circuit board what also this shows you is on the transistors you'll notice there's little charts and it'll say tr510 tr511 meaning transistor 510 511 and that corresponds to a transistor on the circuit board it gives you the collector base and emitter voltages that you should expect at those pins now isn't that a great troubleshooting aid and that's such a help to have something like that here so even though if you're not exactly sure what's going on you can get in there and measure at different points and as long as you see voltages that are similar to what they indicate that part of the board is probably working all right but then when you get to a point where those voltages are not correct you know you're probably getting in the area of the problem so something like that is invaluable to troubleshooting many service manuals including this one give you additional information to help you understand the circuitry within the piece of equipment to help you again to troubleshoot any type of a problem you may have some of y'all have asked for me to do a little bit more with explaining exactly how i go about doing the restorations on the equipment i have so coming up here you're going to see a lot more details about how i do the restorations you're going to see how i remove the assemblies how i get them apart and also how i pick the parts that i'm going to use for the restorations in addition i'm going to show you the soldering techniques how to get components in and out of the different circuit boards and just how to do a neat good job and to have a successful outcome for your restoration this amplifier is very similar to other pieces of equipment that you may own whether it's a pre-amplifier or an amplifier or a receiver so you can go about using this information to do your restoration on your piece of equipment it's really not that complicated if you take it a step at a time i'm going to begin to replace the electrolytic capacitors in the power source circuit board which again is the power supply of the sc9600 and it sits at the bottom of the chassis there's just two screws that are holding the power supply assembly to the chassis i'll loosen up both of those it appears that the board i i may not have to even remove any tie wraps i'm not sure at this point you don't know until you loosen it and you see how it comes out but it looks like there's just two screws and it appears that it's loose um you've got the little alignment tabs that you can see coming up through the chassis and now i'll just rock it a little bit and see what we get and moving it back and forth there she goes yeah she came loose quite easily and there clears the chassis isn't that nice so it's right out there in the uh open for us easy to get at and obviously a lot of slack in the cables it's always a good idea when you have any of these circuit boards removed to just take a look at the back of the circuit board and make sure that you don't see anything obvious like cold solder joints or some other issue that you should take care of before you start the restoration now i'll write down the electrolytic capacitors that i need and i have all of these in stock but you guys that don't have the parts in stock you'll have to do the same thing you'd have to take a look at this power supply just like i'm doing and you write down the values and the voltages of each of those capacitors you can't really go by the parts list in the service manual so the only way to be sure is to take a look at what your unit has in it and that's what you go by you don't go by anything else you want to replace the components exactly as they're in your unit all right i'm going to start to [Music] replace the electrolytic capacitors on the power supply assembly here this tool here is a godsend i mean it really is it's a hakko fr 301 desoldering tool and this this makes your life so much easier so much less risk of damaging any of this artwork it if you ever use it if you ever do use one of these you'll never go back not using it let me just tell you that we're going to start with electrolytic capacitors i've got a couple here that i'm going to use as replacements these are uh pw series they're they're pretty much a a standard to put into vintage audio power supplies this may not be the capacitor that you would use in some areas of this uh of this amplifier but in the power supply they're really um they're really uh a great capacitor uh one thing that um about these they are rated at 105 degrees centigrade the ones that we'll be taking out are 85 degrees centigrade so it just gives you that little bit extra the ones that were in here obviously lasted 40 45 years but this just gives you a little bit more of a cushion and capacitors like this are quite inexpensive so we're gonna go after this capacitor right here it's underneath here uh it's a 47 microfarad 100 volt capacitor and always take a look too like i'm taking a look here now i don't know if you guys can see this on the on the video but make sure you look at how this is orientated as far as polarity you know the positive and the negative leads on this electrolytic capacitor because you've got to put these incorrect and sometimes most the time schematics are 99 right but it's just so easy to take a look here i'm looking at this i see big minuses so in my mind as soon as i take this out i know my replacement capacitor the negative leads gonna be pointed up right so i just take a a visual here and i do them one at a time i don't take them all out put them on the table and then put them all back i do them one at a time i'll take this one out i'll put a new one in and then i'll proceed to the next one and then all the way through the board because you've got a lot greater risk of making a mistake if you start pulling out a half a dozen of these electrolytic capacitors and then you mix up the 100 microfarad with the 47 it's just much better to just go ahead and do them one at a time so i'm going to show you how easy this is to take out with a tool like this like this hakko fr-301 so we take a look and we usually can kind of get an idea of of where the leads are you get used to this after a period of time but you just heat this lead a little bit and you might have been able to hear that sucking the solder right out for me you know this is a pretty good size one and you can see on this one and this is what they do some of these capacitors this one here up at the top came completely loose this one still is holding on a little bit so what we can do is just take our soldering iron heat that because they bent these when they installed them and there we go we got him loose so i don't know if you can see those wiggling around or not but they bent them at 90 degree angles so these won't come out right now oh it might if you yanked it but there's no reason to right we can just take our pliers and straighten up this lead a little bit take our pliers and again just straighten up this lead a little bit and you make sure it's loose the main thing you want to make sure is that these leads are loose from these eyelets because if these are still attached and you start yanking on this other side you'll pull those eyelets right out and so you just want to take your time make sure that's nice and loose and it feels nice and loose and now i'm just gonna pull it from the bottom here and how she came right came right out easily and did a really nice job here removing the solder up on the top side so we'll take a look here and make sure it's what i think it is and it is a 47 microfarad hundred volt and uh i'll go ahead and get the replacement and it's interesting isn't it whether you guys can see this or not here's the replacement here over on this side this brown one this nishikan pw series and here's the original uh panasonic i can see the little panasonic uh symbol here so this was a panasonic do you would have what a shock right see that's a techniques amp uh i'm sure this one this this amp's full of panasonic parts all the ones they could use anyway and they certainly made uh electrolytic capacitors back then and they still do today and this i want to tell you again if you use panasonic in this i'm using a nishikon in this particular spot but if you want to use a panasonic capacitor that's great too i mean i mean they make great products they still make them you can still get them at mouser or digikey and if you want to use panasonic that's great too so we go ahead and you can see the leads are quite long these were cut off you know this was assembled at the factory and these were bent down about 90 degrees so they could be flow soldered but the the replacements got these very long leads and always the negative side is going to be the shorter one but not only that you can see a big minus sign on uh on the capacitor and that's going to tell you that's the negative side and as i told you i took a look before to make sure which way to orientate this because on this particular under here you can't see it you guys can't from the camera angle but there is a minus sign that's printed here uh that's silk screened here on the board but again don't always go by that 99 of the time it's correct but uh every now and then these will not be uh marked correctly and always go by the way they were when you got them you know don't say well they must have put it in backwards at the factory no they didn't put it in the way it came out and always as i said take a look so we'll go ahead and i'm pushing him up in there and he actually sat in there really nice and tight sometimes they'll wiggle a little bit right and be a little bit loose but in this guy's case he's sitting really nice and tight up under the board and so i can just go ahead and solder him and again i mentioned tools you can use whatever type of soldering iron you want there's a lot of good ones i've got a hakko soldering iron yeah they're about i don't think they run they run maybe a hundred dollars or so and it's a great soldering iron but you don't have to use one you know like this one you can get one for 30 40 bucks that'll work fine but just don't go to the flea market get a three dollar soldering iron if you're going to work on your precious vintage audio equipment just don't do it so i'm going to go ahead and just solder these leads and what i do too i end up keeping all of my parts i just got a little bag over here a little zip lock says technique sc9600 and i'll put the old capacitors in there and i keep those why yeah who knows but i do i keep all the old capacitors from my uh from my restoration so i'm gonna go through now and replace the rest of the uh electrolytics let me go after uh this electrolytic down here at the bottom and again i'm gonna take a look make sure of the orientation of the electrolytic capacitor and the negative is over here left and i can tell this is orientated differently it's orientated this one was orientated on the vertical this one's like on the horizontal [Music] this one again and you always want to check that make sure that eyelet's loose that pin is loose there you know you wiggle this you can feel this being loose and some of these eyelets um will rip quite easily and that's one thing that hack of 301 really helps you with so it looks alright and we do the same thing with cutting again just like we did on the last one don't have to be too precise you just don't want to cut down into that uh solder and you don't want to leave these super long so whatever you prefer and again you figure out where your cuts are you get rid of that extra wire that you've cut off i've got a few more to do here so i'm going to go ahead and get those done and now i'm going to replace a 470 microfarad 10 volt electrolytic capacitor and i'll tell you that almost always i'll never replace the 10 volt capacitors that i that i do in my restorations with another 10. usually i'll put a 25 in um did this 10 volt one last all these years yes it did but these 25 volt uh replacements cost practically no more than the 10 volt and um so i'll go ahead and replace the 10 volt with a 25 and again you may be able to see this you may not the capacitor coming out is an 85 degree centigrade rated capacitor and the one going in is 105 centigrade so you've got a little bit higher temperature rating and that will hopefully make this capacitor run at its spec for longer okay i've got the electrolytic capacitors changed out in the power supply and now i'll mount it back into the chassis uh fortunately i was able to get this assembly out didn't even even have to undo a uh tie wrap see that one i see that one there we go okay we got it back back up in there and as you guys uh remember all we had was uh um two screws down here on the bottom uh let's see my little and what i do you guys can do whatever you want to do you you start a project you start removing these screws out and then you're like wondering well where'd they go or what goes where i just use a little dish okay now with the power supply done i've got the unit back sitting normally going to work on the driver assemblies just take the two screws out of the top let's take a look and see what we got here i'm going to put this aside you know there's a left and a right driver there's one under here too but it looks like which will be very nice if this is the case it looks like it's a plug-in connector and that would be great because then i could take this driver remove it and then work on it easily so that would be wonderful if that's the case so i'm going to go ahead looks like there's two screws here all right we got that loose um boy it surely looks unless there's something else holding us it looks like i can unplug this it really does let's see if that's the case well oh no that looks alright man wow let me get over here doesn't look like anything else is holding it now it's gonna come holy smokes wow look at that i mean whoever did the mechanical uh engineering on this unit there's something sticky on here too i mean i don't know what that is um something oh wow or something as i said earlier you know there's something sticky down here in the chassis i don't know if you can see it here from this angle or not but there's something something got something got spilt in here i guess i mean i don't know but um boy is that nice how i wish every unit was like this holy smokes it's right in my hand you know now now the this is good for what i'm doing restoring for troubleshooting oh my god what a pain in the buttocks you know it would be the opposite you'd have to go from the bottom here this connector to do the troubleshooting because good luck if this were mounted down in here and something was broke on here uh and you had to try to troubleshoot imagine getting a meter a scope whatever down in here good luck probably isn't going to happen you know i mean certainly not easily so you probably would have to turn the unit over and figure out what it is you're trying to look at at this connector once again that's fine coming in and out of this board but if you've got something internal here wrong it's gonna it would be kind of uh i think a pain to work on uh great great to change out electrolytic capacitors a real pain though if you had to troubleshoot this um the good thing and i'm assuming although i better not because i can i just as i said that i can see an l over here meaning i'm guessing left and uh over here you're going to see one that's probably got an r i was going to say well this is nice maybe you can just go ahead and if you got a problem with one you know you can take this one put it over on the right hand side and vice versa but maybe it does not work that way and uh it probably doesn't when you have an l on here it tells you something so probably they're not uh exactly the same you know the connectors are different or what have you uh so that's good wow i'll put the uh i think i'll put i will move him off the test bench i'll stop plenty of room what i'll do though you know when worked on the bottom there on the power supply i'm just going to lift him back up on his uh on his backside here and i'll get in here and change out these electrolytics and actually while i'm at it right before i move the unit that was so easy you know what i'm going to do right i'm going to take the right one out too as i'll work on them both at the same time sometimes i'll do things one thing at a time in this case though this is so easy to get at just why wouldn't you [Music] in this restoration i'm going to show you a little bit more about how i pick components how i do the restorations themselves i don't show that all that often and i thought this is a good opportunity on this amplifier to do that how i pick components and how i just go about restoring a piece of equipment so about ready to get started here on this first driver assembly and i'm going to show you the capacitors i'm going to use with it next i've got my capacitors laid out here the replacement capacitors for the driver assemblies that we removed there from the top once again so nice to have these in my hand like this in this case i'm going to use a couple film capacitors i'm going to change out uh a couple of the different capacitors electrolytic capacitors that were uh that are in the audio path and there's a couple small electrolytics that i'm going to use film capacitors with also i'm going to use some audio grade electrolytics for some of the little bit larger ones any of the capacitors that are in the signal path i'm going to use audio grade capacitors for those okay going to get started on the left driver assembly here just like before going to use that uh hakko fr301 desoldering tool that's going to make my life much much simpler to get these capacitors out and you can really start anywhere you want again just um just make sure you take a look at the orientation of the electrolytic capacitor uh before you remove it so you can make sure that you get your replacement back in so i might as well start right here at the top why not now i can see here these leads are pretty long they were put in they're pretty big capacitors and then they folded them down onto the uh onto the board where they were flow soldered so this may take a little bit more work to get these out sometimes you even need to flow a little bit of solder on there and it makes it easier but we'll give it a try just just like this might have to work around it you may not be able to see the um how much lead there is here but there's a good amount here there's a good uh quarter to three eighths of an inch so i'm gonna have to kind of work around that a little bit let's see see it does such a good job of sucking that solder out i think we did all right on that one might need a little more work but as i mentioned before really the best way you can get your thumb under like a board like this and i'm going to work on this other lead and just start to sock suck the solder out and wiggle it at the same time and that helps it come loose and that one looks like it came pretty loose this one here got a little chunk of solder i can see it yeah that's pretty good there too i think maybe you guys can see those wiggling and see i before i showed you that you need to straighten these to pull them out now look these are quite long if you can tell and they look like they're pretty loose which you can also do just as easily right and make your life a little bit easier instead of like like me a lot of times i bend them up you can just go ahead and cut them because they're not going to be used anymore and cut these leads right off just about where they go down in through the eyelet and then you don't have to bend those pins back and forth to get them straightened to get them out of the hole right so let's give him a pull and see if he comes out yeah see that one's loose but this is again i told you about those eyelets you gotta if it doesn't want to come out hit it again with your iron try to show you here just try to hit it right there with the iron a little bit and yeah here it came out and give her a little bit of a pull because the main thing you want to do is not damage those eyelets right so if it's not if it doesn't literally fall out for you that's all you've got to do is just kind of hit just take your time i guess is the point there's no hurry here and certainly you're gonna hold yourself up a lot longer if you if you rip out any of these little eyelets or something so it's just better to take your time so this is a hundred microfarad 63 volt uh capacitor that gonna be replacing and i've got some 100s 100 microfarad 100 volt replacement so again bumping them up a little bit 63 volt to 100 volt and that just gives you a little bit more room there um maybe down the road that'll be a difference this capacitor this 100 volt capacitor will be under a lot less stress than the original was so again just got to make sure it's orientated right all right we've got and then this guy shows a little minus sign here and we knew before by looking at it we knew the minus was down to the down to the bottom of the board so negative lead goes in there and now see before i think i'm on the power supply board these guys stayed up here tight i don't know if you can see how loose that is so if i push it and i've got to turn the board over right to solder it'll end up pulling from the board one way or another and so the way to just get that to stay pretty much where you want to you can spring these just a little bit this one here and this one here and that's going to hold them in place i mean easily so you can see now this one's right up against the board and now you can hit that with some solder and i'll do the same thing they did they um this is a pretty long land here and they put a pretty good chunk of um of the lead down on here so what i'll do is i'll just give this guy a little bit of a cut now i'm gonna give this guy a little cut right here how's that we don't need much we don't even need to do this frankly and then we can push these guys down make sure he's nice and solid there and then you just take your pliers push it flat take your pliers push it flat and as i said you really don't even have to do this but we'll put them back in like they had them so there you've got a nice a nice um spot to solder and you'll make sure those will stay nice and tight for for a long time so we get our solder we get our soldering iron here and then we can hit this guy first and this guy here has got a pretty good about a land area so we had put a little bit extra solder on there than you normally would with just a regular eyelet and this guy here push him down a little flatter just did that with my finger and then we can hit this guy also same thing and once you get the solder hot you know you don't have to really worry where you're at it's going to just sort of flow you know it's like spilling a glass of water just it's going to go so that looks pretty darn good and if you look over here on this side it's nice and solid with the board it's in there nice and straight and that's what you want does it make it work better no it doesn't but it just looks better right looks a lot like the ones that uh that we uh replaced so and that's just the way of doing this board it's the same thing as the power supply right we're gonna go through and change out we've got how many electrolytics on this one i just changed this one we've got him so one two three four five six on the board to do and again i won't show you each and every single one on here i'll um go ahead and get some more of these replaced and just continue on do i think i'm going to hear a difference with this film capacitor replacing the small electrolytic or this audio grade capacitor replacing this other one i i don't know as i've mentioned before i've used about every brand you can think of in different situations and i can't really tell you as i've said before that one's better than the other just use something of quality i will use often a film capacitor to replace the electrolytic capacitors because the small value ones because it does seem that most folks feel that's a superior sounding capacitor a film capacitor compared to an electrolytic that's in that signal path [Music] okay i've got both drivers um finished up got those electrolytic capacitors those 40 45 year old electrolyte capacitors out of her there's a very good chance these drivers won't have to come out for a long time to come we don't know for sure i mean transistors do go bad diodes do go bad but it's those electrolytic capacitors that go bad most often and even if they're not causing you an issue at least you don't think they are they degrade over time if you've got a 40 45 year old piece of equipment like this and you still have old electrolytic capacitors in it the odds are that it doesn't sound as good as it could it doesn't mean you don't like it doesn't mean you don't enjoy it but it could probably function better with new electrolytic capacitors because over time they all fail it doesn't matter the brand after this many years they've all deteriorated to the point of many of them will be out of spec and as i said in previous videos most of the time occasionally they do but most of the time they don't blow up on you but at some point they'll fail and unfortunately when they fail a lot of times they'll take out other components around them and so these capacitors are available they're readily available still today some of the other electronics may not be you may be able to get an equivalent for a transistor but you can't get that original one again many times resistors you can get that's not a problem but that's one of the big issues it's not like this capacitor goes and then that's it a lot of times it'll end up putting voltages at certain points that shouldn't be there and so if you've got a transistor that's only rated at 50 volts and suddenly it sees 100 it's going to fry that and maybe fry a couple other things along with it or fry a whole bunch of things and really one of the worst things that would happen especially with these driver assemblies failing is they take out your output transistors and that would be um that that's kind of a that's a bad thing so a lot of times it's just better to get in there get this old stuff out of there and it's going to give you a better sound but maybe even more importantly it's going to give you reliability and your old vintage equipment will work for many decades to come so now i'm going to take these and i'm going to mount them back in the chassis and like i always do i'll mount them back in i'll power it up and see if everything's working all right before i move on now i'm going to mount those driver assemblies back into the sc9600 and we'll give it a try so as you recall these had left and right sides and the connectors are different sizes so we can tell this guy's got to go in this way right now we'll get the uh the right side in there same thing just make sure you line the connectors up no big deal but just make sure they're lined up and then just kind of give it even pressure on both sides the best you can one side may start before the other but it's all right there we go okay after testing out the uh amp make making sure that it power up again after doing the work there to the power supply and the two driver units i'm going to reseat the power transistors with some new thermal compound i'm going to go ahead and do that and then this amp will be running for probably another 45 years it's just another way to keep them a little bit cooler and hopefully keep them keep them running for a few more decades so now i've got the unit back down flat in this unit which you don't see very often there are little plastic covers over the power transistors i've got little portable light here for me to look down in they look like they're just pressed in there to me and see if i can just pop it out of there now again what are we dealing with uh 45 year old plastic cover any of you guys that work around vehicles with old plastic or whatever you know every time you touch it look out right so i got to be very careful with this but i've got to take this cover off if i want to reseat this transistor i've got to take this cover off so what i'm going to do is press here a little bit see if we can get it to move so here we go and i'm going to take it real easy with it okay it's moving you may not be able to see that but it is starting to move see if i can get behind it at all come here up there we go it just popped right there now again what are we dealing with old plastic it's tight i probably should try to get up on the other side of it here a little bit this worries me i want to get this evened up you know what i mean yeah like that i don't know if you can see that or not that's much more instead of pulling this plastic in one big swoop this is taking a while but this is what you got to do with some of this stuff right i don't want to break these can i order these no i want to get in there so and what do you know i think we're pretty good i'm not going to say we got it yet i'm going back down here for a second there we go and well there we go we got it we didn't break it right but you got to be patient that's one thing you just got to be patient this is a pretty thin piece of plastic and it's been around a power transistor for 45 years so you know it's a sustain some heat and you just got to be extremely careful and now i can see how it's attached actually i can see how this one's attached see these little tabs you may not be able to i understand on the camera but there's these little tabs so i'll put that over there now with the covers off i'm going to remove the transistors the power transistors in most units and i can tell this is a typical one has a socket that's held in by these screws outside of where you see the power transistor and then here holding the transistor or the screws into the socket so these two screws to the outside are the socket you don't want to remove those but you do want to remove these two here some amplifier is a little bit different the whole socket comes loose but in in this case this is typical uh take these two screws out and then this transistor will come right out so i'm gonna go ahead and do that came loose but i usually loosen one then loosen the other uh they're loose and the transistor now will pull right out many times it's going to be real tight for my fingers to get in here with one hand most of the time they're not quite this deep and you can just squeeze them and pull them this one i'm going to kind of have to do the two-hand system or the two-finger system here and kind of wiggle it i think to get it out and i'll probably block everything here but the idea is however you can get a hold of this guy maybe i can get him with one hand let me try it yeah i think he's coming he's it's gonna be a little bit hard to get out that way i think now i got the two-fingered system but you don't have to worry about hurting anything you're not really you know these power transistors you think this is the transistor well it's just the case of the transistor right it's not like you're going to squeeze it and hurt it the transistor is inside this case so it comes right out easy enough these power transistors are keyed they're slightly off center with each other so it's impossible to put this in wrong in this socket you could put it wrong in one of these other sockets in other words get two transistors mixed up but you really can't get it mixed up here but it's always a good idea to take pictures make sure you got it orientated right but came right on right on out of there no issues at all and down in here you may be able to see that insulator i don't know if you can or not but we're going to take him out i'll probably get us he might come loose but pry them with a little small screwdriver and he should come out of there because once you get this started it'll peel right off or maybe even do i have a pick out here pick works good sometimes okay there she comes what you want to do is to get in here and i'll rub it in there a little bit and really it's not a whole lot to clean up because there's not much thermal compound and this alcohol will uh evaporate here in just a few seconds so we have to worry about waiting anything to dry or anything it'll go away shortly by the time i get the thermal compound out and um the new insulators and and that reminds me we're going to put new insulators in we're not going to put this 2 3 cent insulator back in right we took it out so we've got insulators that um brand new ones that we'll use these again available at digikey mouser.com uh another part that you can still get no issues you know you can get these but we're gonna put thermal compound on our uh on our insulator and um transistor and that reminds me too we don't just clean the heat sink now we're going to use a new insulator so we don't we're just going to toss this guy away but the transistor itself we want to clean also i'm going to go ahead and put the new thermal compound in and the new insulator and reinstall the original power transistor back in here and hopefully she'll be good to go for another 40-45 years this thermal compound is some messy stuff uh no getting around it it uh it cleans up readily with alcohol it's it's no big deal you're gonna make a little bit of a mess with it so just if you're gonna do this get some quality uh thermal joint compound like this one wakefield makes great stuff uh this jar this big would last you for the rest of your life if it didn't expire you know does have an expiration date they're good for about five years or so really the way to apply this there's there's no easy uh non-messy way i i just use my finger and you don't need very much you really don't [Music] just spread it the best you can there's no need for super accuracy or anything like that it's just messy stuff that's all so you want some on the transistor side of this insulator and you're going to want some on the insulator side that's going to hit the heat sink so we put a little bit on the transistor side and what you can do like right now you just give it a little mass job and this will help it just kind of flatten out in there and cover 98 of what you're trying to cover and you just want a very thin thin amount and you can kind of move this a little bit and this has gotten it you know spread out pretty evenly uh between the new insulator and the uh and the uh transistor and so again the easiest thing to do is put some a little bit not much again a little bit of this goes a long way just start spreading it out on the insulator side now you can rub this down on the heat sink but then it makes a little bit more of a mess right and don't worry if you get some of this stuff on the transistor i'm holding the transistor and you're going to get some of that on the transistor don't worry about on the transistor case itself don't worry about getting it on the transistor case or anything and just spread that that out as good as you can because we'll clean that up when we put it back in but now you take a look and you orientate this guy just like he came out so if we took a look next guy to him but as i said you can't make a mistake with this if you put this in it won't plug in then you know you have it 180 degrees out and as i said this is a little bit messy and this guy too one thing about this guy he's deep he's going to be hard for me to get my fingers in there to get this in neatly i'm going to probably have to two-hand it here see i don't mind if you pop up like that a little bit try to keep my fingers off the goods here a little bit there and i just felt him go in and then you can feel them in the socket just give them a push and then we can give them a little bit of a twist a little bit of a make sure he's seated good kind of a feeling here and we're not worried and you can kind of see here we've gotten some of this thermal compound on the transistor we can clean that up i'll clean that up in a minute and so that's good to go and all we got to do we'll put our screws back in and these you want snug but you don't want to crank down on it so there he is there's the new uh the new old power transistor in there and he'll be good to go here for you know decades to come and so now it's just a matter of going down the line and doing them all it really doesn't take very long it's a little bit as i said a little bit messy but no big deal and so i'll go ahead and get the rest of them done [Music] do as i said you know it's just it takes you a little while it's something that'll take me an hour soda knockout right you cleaned it up pretty good and then and again you can see that the um the thermal compound is there but not overly there you know it's not all spread out all over the place so once again it gives these transistors an easy life for the uh next uh 40 50 years that this amp should be running all right i've got the transistors all reseeded and now it's time to put those uh remember these little covers that we had to take off so i think um [Music] they'll come they'll go right in if i kind of even them up here and just kind of give them a push in evenly let's see what happens probably it'll go feels pretty good so felt that sounded good heard it click in so that's good there's one and i'll do another kind of try to do it the same way kind of push it in evenly here whoops a little too low better and yeah so these guys will just click right in so i'm going to go down the line and put those back in take one more look here underneath everything looks good we've uh powered the unit back up and we made sure it powered up and both channels were working and everything still uh seems to be good with it so i'm going to go ahead and put the put the bottom cover back on now you know you guys probably don't need explanations how to put covers on with screws but you know usually you start on one corner like i have up here and then you get another one started you know down in the other corner [Music] now i'm about ready to put the face plate back on one thing that really that i use that i got not that long ago maybe a couple years ago is this little rechargeable air duster and uh you can see the box maybe you can but it's the sky here and i used i used to use compressed air and that kind of thing to just do a little bit here uh on the face plates there's a little bit of dust on this inside part um this guy here does a pretty good job you can probably hear it it's got a good amount of air that comes out of it and it's got a couple of attachments a lot of times there's this little um there's this little fine brush that's on the end of it and you can kind of just move that along here a little bit [Laughter] i get those few pieces of dust that may be there and the same thing here i got the face plate in my lap and i'll do that a little bit too i'm not worried about the outside part just this inside you know you've got the meters and then you've got this inside area here that concerned with so i'm going to go ahead and put that on i've got the unit unplugged now and to put these face plates on i mean i may be telling you guys something you already know but you end up just getting all these switches even whatever that takes this isn't gonna go on if this is down so the power switch you have to turn it on to be able to get this faceplate back on and felt pretty good yeah that felt pretty good i think it's going to be on and on this particular unit i'm not going to clean up this face plate a lot i got the worst dirt off it once i get the knobs back on it remember i put those in this little uh this little dish here in the beginning so i'm going to go ahead and get the knobs back on here and get the face plate back on but i'm not going to try to clean this much get the worst of it off because it is really scraped up somebody has scraped their name into it um you know i don't want to take away i know this is going to sound silly the charm of this i don't want it to look brand new i don't want it to look perfect first of all it couldn't even if i wanted it to but i want it to look like it looks there's no way that you could replicate this if you tried to make it look like this right it's beat up in the front it's beat up in the back it's beat up internally it's beat up but thing that was very important to me is what get those two meter lamps working get that power lamp working i wanted those working none of the three worked initially so i wanted i want that to work but i frankly could care less that this face plates all beat up i want the unit to have its lights i want the unit to operate properly and there's no reason this unit won't go as long as one that was that's in pristine condition it's all cosmetic what's wrong with it and frankly i think it's kind of cool looking i know y'all are probably thinking yeah real cool i'll beat the i'll beat the heck here but um i really uh i really like this amplifier i like the way it looks i'm sorry but uh i really do like the way it looks so i'm gonna go ahead and get these knobs back on this face plate i'm bringing out the uh techniques uh sc9600 here put it up here on the hose box for a minute if the hose box will hold it i'm going to uh take a brush uh an old paintbrush and just kind of clean up these heat sinks a little bit i might as well just start with her something just like this for now and i'm gonna get an old go get an old paintbrush and just brush some of this dirt off it i'm not going to clean it up i'm going to keep it looking pretty much like it is but i am going to get that top layer of crud off it so let me go grab a uh an old paint brush and i'll show you what i do uh just to clean that up a little bit as i said i'm not going to clean this amplifier all up i'm just going to get the worst of it and uh paintbrush is a great way of doing that i might as well start here on this heat sink and just brush away a decent amount of this stuff we'll just get the top layer really but it's a good way to um do what i'm trying to do with this unit is i'm trying to not make it look new because you just can't right you guys see a lot of times i'll really try to make the units look as good as i can brand new but this one it just doesn't fit it it just doesn't you know when i first saw it i thought if i get it going get it running there's no way i'm going to try to make something like this look new because it just can't the knobs are scraped up you can see the face plate is on real rough shape i haven't shown the back of the unit i'm going to turn this around and show you the back of the unit it's in rough shape i showed you down inside it it's very dirty and has some surface rust so i'm going to just clean it up here some and i bring it out here uh right instead of doing it in the house and getting all this crud all over the place use my little blower in there for something like the face plate or some some little area but like this just bring it out here and uh really can get a good amount of it top layer of it anyway a little careful in here don't get too crazy i said i'm not really trying to make it look perfect i want it to look like it looks as you guys know i enjoy the history of this stuff and uh this amp's got a history i don't know what it is exactly i got this from my high-end dealer here locally this wasn't like a trade-in on some of his uh ar equipment or his vocals or you know the different high-end equipment he he has but people will bring stuff in off the street like this you know they clear clean out their uncle's uh you know estate or whatever and uh they find this stuff and they take it to somebody like him that's about the only stereo shop left in town right you're not gonna take this out to best buy and see what they'll give you for it it's right up my alley though right that's good i mean i got the top layer off at least this stuff won't come off easily in the house i mean there's plenty of stuff left but whatever a paint brush will take it's it's pretty much taking it so i think that's pretty good i'll give why not give the face plate a little scrub to here a little bit all right there we go i think about ready to go back in the house and i can continue on here we're getting pretty close uh to bench testing as you know we went through and uh got all the electrolytic capacitors out and uh replaced uh power supply and then the two driver assemblies reseeded all the power transistors and put in new thermal compounds so i think she's about ready to go up on the test bench and we'll see what she can do you always want to have the service manual available before you work on the unit or in this case i'm going to check the dc offset and also the idle current in the amplifier and the service manual provides that information so i have up on the screen right now the service manual for the sc 9600 the techniques uh this manual is available at hifiengine.com it's a free download you just have to create an account and you can download all the owners manual service manuals brochures whatever they've got on your particular unit not just on this unit like this techniques xc 9600 so you go ahead and download that and then within this manual you've got the schematics you've got all the information that you need the components that are in it and what we need is the alignment instructions which is up on the screen right now and this tells you where the test points are you may not be able to see this but you are using the test points which are right up here on these driver assemblies right up here at the top if you can use two meters because this makes it easier you can hook up two sets of leads and monitor both channels at the same time if you don't have two meters that's okay but you just have to be careful about hooking your leads up if you're going to move them from your one channel to the next so two meters or better one meter is fine it'll work fine for you you just in this configuration with two meters we can hook them both up and look at them at the same time which is just convenient if nothing else so what i've done right now i've just hooked up both sets of meters the negative and the positive leads to the left and the right channel and with a pair of uh alligator clips and i've got those hooked to my meters and now i'm going to turn on the 9600 and i'm going to see what we have for dc offset on both channels and if it needs to be adjusted we'll be able to do that so what i'm going to do first is power up the 9600 and so we have it powered up it tells us that our output level controls this is the service manual i'm looking up here at the screen at the service manual and what it tells us is to put the output level controls to maximum it tells us to set the speaker switch to on the output impedance switch to normal so again these are all this is all information that's in your service manual and you wouldn't know how to do this even somebody because every amplifier is a little bit different yes they're very similar and people who work on the stuff all the time maybe don't have to follow this but i do and most people do so that you know you're setting up this particular piece of equipment correctly so i've turned on the speaker switch i've got the output impedance in normal and i've got the output levels at max and now let me try to swing this back around here to show you the meters see if this will work for us i think so so what we've got is really less than a millivolt this is the la i have the left channel uh hooked to this meter i have the right channel hooked to this meter so we're just now just a hair over a millivolt dc offset in the left channel am i touching that no i'm not that's that's as you know it's just going to be as good as it gets you start going in there turning stuff and it just isn't worth it for you know 1.2 or 3 millivolts and the other channel is about 3.8 millivolts 3.7 3.8 whether that's coming through on the video i'm not sure but that is just outstanding i'm not touching it either one of them i mean that's as good as it gets you could just screw around all day long and never get them that close because you ideally what you want is zero you want no dc voltage at your speaker outputs but when you have between one and a half and three or four millivolts that's very that's that's beyond excellent that's the dc offset and now we're gonna go for the idle current next so now i have the leads i've moved them from the speaker output terminals to the test points on each driver card and i'm reading up here on the screen and it tells me to connect the meter the positive lead to tp2 and that's marked on the board and the negative terminal to tp3 which is also marked on the board and so on both channels we have that and again did the same thing down here these meters one is on channel is on the left channel and this one over here is on the right channel so again i have the amplifier off right now and i'm going to turn it on and let's see uh let's see what the meter sees so here we go so it's on and when you do idle current this tells me um to let the amplifier warm up for five minutes that for most amplifiers that wouldn't be long enough most of us we turn on our amplifiers and we leave them on for you know a length of time an hour you know two hours whatever it happens to be and i've found that probably five minutes isn't long enough i'm in no hurry i guess maybe if you're doing this um you know again for a living you do exactly what they say but i'm going to give it more than five minutes i'm going to give it you know at least 15 minutes and just sit here and right now i don't know if you can see it or not i'm supposed to have five millivolts at those test points you can see both channels are right around three just a hair under now i noticed when i first powered it up it was about two and a half so they're rising right they're starting to move the right channels now at 3.1 the left channel is about 2.9 and so now we've got to give it some time and let's see if it gets up to about that 5 millivolt level it doesn't look like maybe it will but it may surprise us because sometimes these things can really change as this amplifier is warming up this current this idle current is going to change and you can see just as i'm talking here to you in a few seconds 3.3 30 maybe it's going to surprise us and it's going to end up around 5 millivolts but i'm going to give it um about 15 minutes and then i'm going to come back to it and just see where we're at and see if we need to do any adjusting or not after 15 minutes these guys are right around 5 millivolts as they should should be the left channels about 4.75 the right channel is about 5.2 again am i going to move anything am i going to adjust this to try to get it exactly at 5 because you can really go down a rabbit's hole with trying to adjust the idle current because as soon as i move the pot that controls this this is gonna run one way or the other up or down and you can go on forever trying to get this exact so that's what i'm going to do i'm going to leave it as is i'm going to go ahead and do the bench testing on it and uh what a surprise huh well not really this poor amplifier is a horrible cosmetic shape but it's performing like it was brand new out of the box it really is it's just a testament to how good this equipment is so after 45 years of as you guys can tell with this one a lot of abuse i did not have to make an adjustment it's right where it was when it left japan back in the middle 70s pretty amazing i mean i think i think and this is one reason i love this equipment is this thing went through as much heck as uh anything could and it's operating as good as a new one it'll never look pretty but it's going to i think really sound good and but first of all before i listen to it i'm going to put it up on the test bench i'm going to verify the power it's power specifications it's distortion specifications and we're going to see what uh this sc 9600 can do so i've got the power off again power off right before you do what i'm doing here even though these are insulated you can still make a mistake and it would be a horrible thing to happen so any of you guys that are thinking about doing this just be careful right you can tell it's not all that darn hard is it i mean really is it is it that hard you got the service manual it tells you where to hook stuff up and it tells you what you should have at those points i mean what more can you say and then i mean it you got to remember that there used to be no more but there used to be a lot of people that worked on this equipment every town had a service center the big shops had their own service department and remember that the manufacturers wanted you to take care of yourself this was long before the internet if they didn't have a service manual if they didn't explain to you where to put a probe and what you should expect at those points they'd be getting phone calls all day long in new york new jersey california wherever they all would right techniques pioneer marantz oh no somebody doesn't know how to check dc offset somebody doesn't know how to check the idle current somebody doesn't know how to do something so they gave you the service manual to hopefully for the most part take care of yourself and the only time they got bothered was when they had a situation that was unusual so keep that in mind that a lot of people worked on this stuff i'm not going to say that there's aren't there aren't times when things are difficult to fix but also realize that with some effort that many people can take care of their own issues with their vintage audio equipment all right we're going to do a little bench testing on the techniques sc9600 power amplifier i've got my sound technology audio analyzer 3200 a up on the test bench a couple uh 8 ohm 300 watt load resistors a signal generator and we can see we'll see what this 9600 can do so we're going to see how balanced the channels are we're going to see how much power the amplifier can put out and we're going to check out how much distortion the amplifier also is producing i'm going to run the power up a little bit to let the amplifier warm up for a little while give it 10 or 15 minutes to stabilize and then i'm going to run it a little bit harder and we're going to look at the distortion numbers so for right now i'm gonna run up the uh the signal generator a little bit here on each channel as i said right now i just have a thousand hertz sine wave um at 100 millivolts i'm going to take it maybe to 300 here for a minute let's see what we get up to we get up to about 3.72 [Music] watts i'm going to change the other one to that 300 let's see what we get 3.72 so that is excellent the two channels are tracking very very close together is what that shows you looks like the power meters are moving a little bit but we're on times one so let's just here for a moment go to a little more sensitive level and that just about pegged them uh the most sensitive level there so just to see them work and they look boy they look darn close we'll put it back down here on times one so when we start running it up we don't peg the meters by mistake i've been letting this set here a few minutes we're running about 11 watts 11.1 on uh the left channel and about 10.9 on the uh right channel and as time's gone on i can feel the warmth of the load resistors and the heat sinks are warm i mean you know they're not that ice cold like when you turn them on you know they're by no means hot at all but they're warm well first of all let me tell you this amplifier into eight ohms puts out 110 watts a channel or it did when it was new at .08 percent distortion so just under 0.1 0.08 uh it'll put out its rated uh 110 watts of channel into 8 ohms let's just take a look and see where we're at so all we've got to do here on the audio analyzer right now we're just looking at it flat just monitoring the two channels and i'll go ahead and hit the uh total harmonic distortion uh button and it's reading right now channel a which is the left channel and it's about three .036 eight um so well under point zero eight certainly at this wattage and i'm just gonna go over to the b channel real quick and it's point zero two eight four so just under point zero three so you know point zero three uh point zero three five you know somewhere in there for the two channels so that those are both excellent so we're 700 millivolts going in i mean 21.8 21.6 those two channels are really tracking close and just looking here the meters show the same thing now there there's a test that we can do that will get us to calibrate these meters but i will say just looking at them with my eye i don't know if the camera can really see that they're dead on you know they're just about dead on even with each other so let's just go ahead and hit the distortion button again we're up at we're running you know 21.8 21.6 watts continuous that's you know that's doing a little bit there that's gonna it's gonna make some sound anyway and at least hook to most speakers so .0261 on the left and [Music] .013 on the right what can you say remember .08 is its rating this is the thing i love about so many pieces of vintage equipment that i have they are they are just rated so conservatively this is way under point zero eight now you're going to hear .08 compared to point zero two maybe you're not listening to it but it's just was it was the way things were done back then things were over engineered you know things were under promised you know and then almost always they'll beat their specifications and then you got to remember this is 45 years later this isn't brand new you know and then you guys saw the video uh this poor amp went through um went through quite a lot and here it is still performing like it was a new amplifier coming out of the box in 1975. i just find that just amazing about the old stuff you know it's just built so well so we're just letting it sit here these guys are warmer absolutely i mean nothing to worry about you know it's a it's a class a b amp it's it's gonna be uh it's gonna be uh a little bit warm but you know more or less what i would expect so that's good too as you recall that i receded those power transistors with some new thermal compound and that's their job right get that heat onto these guys and get it away from the transistors right so yeah he's warm she's warm but nothing you know you can see me i don't know if you can see it actually i keep my hand right on it no issues at all let's go ahead and run her up another notch or two let's see what happens here let's run her up a couple notches what do we get to get the other channel there now we're about 35 let me go back and actually i'm here still on the b channel which is the right channel 35 watts and look at where we're at point zero one percent distortion under point zero two again point zero eight is expect let me go over to the a channel point zero one eight seven i mean incredible the wattage thirty five four the wattage 35 one so very very even if if you get that close with with channels tracking you it's as good as it gets it's again it's as good as it gets you can't really ask for much more than that so it's uh now we are running it right now you know i'll go through different frequencies but i'm not going to go through the whole testing with you i just want to show you though that we do all this work right i mean i go through and i change out the electrolytic capacitors and i make sure then the unit's running correctly as you saw earlier in the video went in there made sure dc offset was correct made sure the idle current was correct if the idle current's correct that's where these channels will track together if that's way off one way or another you either won't get the power output out of them or if the channels are mismatched one channel will be way off from the other and as you can see they're very very close together so let's go flat here for a second you know 35 9 and 35 7. i mean you're not going to hear that and if you're running your amplifier at that type of power level continuous you're going to be having peaks that are beyond the capability of this amplifier and here we are 45 years later just letting her just letting her sit there and cook right let's see what she feels like oh yeah she's warm she's warm but not abnormally warm you know like like she should be the two sides feel the same the two sides are testing the same you know both this is the left side i don't know if you can see my hand here i just i'm just resting it over here on the heat sink and then i come over here to the right side and uh yeah they both got some warmth to them but like they should i could leave this here and go to bed and i'm a hundred percent confident i could come back and she'd still be sitting here like this you know this is the kind of equipment that was built back in the 70s you know i mean it's just amazing stuff to me just is and this piece of equipment that was abused for so many years um i i'm gonna be really excited to listen to it because i mean on the test bench it has just uh it's performing wonderfully and boy if it sounds anything like it performs um i'm gonna really enjoy it we're just got it hammered we just got it locked right here it can't move right about 62 watts of channel and you can see the distortion just stays right where it is you know .03 4.042 i mean this thing is solid as a rock yeah these are getting warm now and again these are 300 uh watt uh load resistors and uh you know they're they're warm enough to get my hand off it these things are still doing all right i mean don't get me wrong now they're warm they're warm but if my amp was running like this i wouldn't worry about it i don't think the transistors are worrying about it they're just uh you know they're just cruising along there just like this amp is i mean it's it's um it's impressive it really is you know and a lot of times this older equipment i just let it run at a reasonable rate right you know it's kind of like i think everybody will run it up to 110 and i i'm sure it will do it or run it up to what it'll ever ever clip at and i have done that in the past but i think the thing's 45 years old it's amazing it's sitting right here doing half of its pop it'll never run this hard in a music system right the only reason it's running this hard is because it's getting a continual a continual single sine wave into it and it's having to run a lot harder than it'll ever run in my system i mean and i do like loud music and i may even get up in the peaks like this one's running right now i'll listen to it loud sometimes but it's gonna be that you know these peaks up and down up and down transits up and down not just locked in here like it is i'm gonna go ahead and do a little more testing no need to keep you know keep talking about it keep showing it but i'm just so impressed with it that i'm keeping the camera running it's just how it is amazing amazing i just sit back here and i just uh i marvel at this thing that after all these years and all the abuse that went through it can perform so well i mean it's it's it's really incredible so i am going to shut her down finally you guys are probably thinking good you know go ahead with the restoration work done on this sc 9600 and it in the restoration being verified up on the test bench i'm very confident that when i hook this amplifier up into my main system it's going to sound as good as it did when it came out of the box or as close as it possibly could when it was manufactured in 1975 this is a prime example of how a piece of this vintage audio equipment can be beat up stuck in a barn and still be able to operate and operate reliably for decades to come i truly believe this i think this amplifier will see its 100th birthday many of you know that follow my videos i'm very passionate about getting those old electrolytic capacitors out because they are the number one failure in vintage audio equipment and once you get those removed you've got ninety percent of your problems out of it and there's a good chance it'll run for decades longer without those old electrolytic capacitors in it and this 9600 was a great example of why you should restore your piece of equipment and not wait until it fails as you saw along the way this particular amplifier was quite easy to restore all those assemblies were easy to either remove or to get in a position for me to change out those electrolytic capacitors if this amplifier had a problem and i had to troubleshoot one of those driver assemblies it would have been difficult to troubleshoot those driver assemblies the way that they're mounted in this amplifier so to me it's a no-brainer just for a few dollars there's only a few bucks in this amplifier i did not have the filter capacitors let me mention that i'm going to change those i had to order those the rest of the capacitors were all quite inexpensive and i've probably only got 20-25 dollars in this whole restoration for you guys out there the same way it is so much easier to restore this equipment then repair it because now you're going to have to really know what you're doing and even if you know what you're doing this particular amplifier if you had to work on either one of those driver assemblies it'd be interesting it'd be very slow going and also dangerous more for the equipment probably than you but it would be very difficult to get a probe down inside those driver assemblies and to really troubleshoot this in any type of an efficient manner as i mentioned before very easy though to get in there and restore it remove them put them right in front of me piece of cake something else could happen but the odds are that this amplifier is not going to have to be apart for decades you know i don't know 10 years 20 i mean we don't know for sure but there's a very good chance i won't have to ever get back into this amplifier somebody else will down the road in 30 years or 40 but i won't have to ever get into it again but it's just silly if you're capable now i get it if you're not capable if you don't think that you can get this apart and and get it back together all right and the biggest trick in this one really was if you can solder and unsolder because you saw it i showed you from all different angles was it really that difficult i think most of you are looking at it saying i can take out two phillip head screws and just move that board down 90 degrees like i did with the power supply or like when i did the driver cards you looked at the top i took out a couple screws again i pulled it out of a connector was that that difficult no it's almost more difficult to to make a pot of coffee in the morning honestly right the big trick and the big key and where things can go wrong is if you're not capable of soldering and usually that's about having the tools and you saw that i have that hakko desoldering tool it's a wonderful tool and it makes makes me look smart because it's difficult sometimes to get these components out of these circuit boards without damaging them because you got to remember they're older so i get it i get that it's not you know just something you can do but you can see that the actual process for restoring this amplifier was pretty easy really could get it apart pretty easy and back together pretty easy the whole trick is the soldering part being able to solder and unsolder those parts and i'm not trying to talk you into ruining your equipment if you don't think you can do it you can't do it but i tried to show you this was quite a long video and i just tried to show you every every detail i could about a project once again it's not that hard if you take your time and do a little planning this equipment's not going to go down easily it'll keep running for you at some point you've got to do some basic maintenance on this stuff and really the main thing is those electrolytic capacitors the main thing you need to do is get those 40 and 50 and 60 year old electrolytic capacitors out of your piece of equipment and you're probably good to go so now i've got the 9600 hooked up here in my test room a lot of times i'll hook up a piece of equipment once i get done with it right in the same room that i that i worked on the equipment and this way i can let it sit here i can have it on for several hours i can listen to it a little bit more than i could up on the test bench and so now i've got a decent pair of speakers hooked up to it instead of the cheap ones from the test bench i've got a cd player that i've run directly into the rca inputs and i'll just control it by the output controls here on the amp i'll control the volume down there so i'm about ready to turn it on i've got both speakers hooked up i've got the cd player hooked in and so the next thing is to turn it on so i'm going to go ahead and do that and it looks like it powered up looks good we got the power led and we've got the uh the meters lit up so it looks good this 9600 sounds great it is very clean clear open crisp i don't know really how else to describe it other than whatever you put into it is what comes out of it and what more can you ask from an amplifier it's got a ton of power seems effortless most people are not going to need more power than this amplifier can produce well there's my techniques 9600 power amplifier it was worth every dollar and every hour i worked on it i'm so glad i did i'm so glad it's up and running i'm so glad it's going to continue on for decades more it is a wonderful amplifier it's the only techniques amplifier that i have in my collection and after working on this amplifier and after listening to it i think i'm going to get some more of them if i ever get the opportunity i hope you enjoyed the video i know it was a long one there was a lot in here and any of you guys that are still hanging after your sixth beer or sixth cup of coffee i really do appreciate you watching it and if you enjoyed it please give me a thumbs up down below and for you non-subscribers if you enjoyed this video and you'd like to see more of them please subscribe and as always thank you so much to my present subscribers you all have a good day you

Channel: Vintage Audio Addict

Views: 181,526

Keywords: vintage stereo reapir, vintage stereo restoration, vintage amplifier testing, best ever amplifier, vintage stereo, vintage stereo testing, vintage stereo repair, old stereo, old stereo repair, vintage audio, classic stereo, hi-fi, hifi, hi-fi stereo, technics, technics se-9600p, technics amplifier, vintage technics

Id: qzbR9Dj9ax4

Length: 131min 53sec (7913 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 21 2022