Given your user experience, your point is valid. But I would argue that AVR's, on the whole, are not reliable. The premise I will offer for this argument is that many of the AVR's that arrived at my bench were operated as intended, without abuse from the user. They just died spontaneously without due cause from its external environment. This naturally raises the issue of reliability. You've been fortunate; many have not.
I share your ideas about multichannel receivers and the commercial and technical policy of these self proclaimed high end brands. I also admire you finally had a comprehensive look into this monster, as it was the typical case of the obviously tampered receiver, wich is the ultimate no in most technical service. You also know when you have any problem with one on these "designers" brands, they will generally tell you the costs to repair any malfunction is excessive du to newest models AND will propose these with newer more extensive design, with new DA converter, IP radios capacities, a new color screen or remote control... and generally even offer you some special price to achieve this (they pretend to be generous with a 10% discount, but they will never really cut in their huge margins!). Car dealers share the same policy, but they're more generous! Most of these brands offer you a classy exclusive look but when it comes to multichannel or other complex tech, share complex and delicate technology they generally will never repair. The basic problem is they pretend to use custom made patent protected circuits, but in fact use massively specialized IC and technologies from different brands, to finally never communicate clearly and propose functional datasheets with updates, as you can have multiple variations depending on circuits availability or price... All these components and raiser boards are supposed to communicate and must function together, but no one has ever conceived any diagnostic bus like any other complex assembly, imagine repairing your car without OEBD tools nowadays! Most also share poor quality discrete components, massive use of corrosive glue, bad connectors, ringing transformers, because even if they can be conceived in Europe or US, they are finally made in lo cost Chinese factories, with the poorest actual standards: Look at this 2007 amp, and you get a mess of wires, corrosive stuff like the one used to glue a probably useless cooler on a IC, poor insulation, and visibly multiple technicians attempts.
I found this: For the AVR300 you do this in the engineering menu, RDSinfo + Preset tune together on the front panel takes you into this menu use ^V arrows to navigate to the restore option, make sure you leave the RC5 codes alone otherwise it will stop responding to the remote control, set restore to yes then exit using Ok on the exit option.
I had a pioneer VSX digital 7.1 home theater receiver that started doing the AMP ERR and shutting down randomly. I paid well over 700 for this unit because I wanted something to last and it met all of my criteria including the sound quality you get with pioneer. It was just out of warranty and I treated the unit well by adding a fan to keep it cool and running 8 ohm speakers with it like it claimed. I found out the hybrid digital amplifier chips were bad causing DC to leak into the outputs and they were unobtanium at the time so I smashed it into little bits and sorted the metals out of it for scrap.
I feel your pain. I purchased a Yamaha DRX-1 DVD recorder new back in early 2000's for over AU$2000. Lasted 3 months and then the laser died. Waited 2 months for it to be fixed by the service center, work for another year and then died again. Turns out that it was a Philips re-badge and not made by Yamaha at all and the actual problem was poorly written firmware that did the laser power calibration each time a recordable disk was inserted damaging the laser slowly. After that I purchased a Sony RDR-HX900 HDD DVD recorder with extended warranty for AU$1700 and it still works today almost 20 years later. Years ago I repaired a Pioneer SC-LX73 with a blown digital amp and was able to get parts but that was in Australia.
That's why in my main system I have a fully analogue Kenwood amp from 1990 with discrete amplifier chips and a real input selector switch. It sometimes needs contact cleaning (every 10 years or so), but it has no complicated ICs that could eventually fail.
not all British stuff is this bad, I have a vintage Meridian D600 active speaker system, it's a work of art inside. Each driver has it's own discrete amplifier stage, and the preamp board and equalization is all done with discrete components. The digital input/control board is powered off an unregulated transformer output and has it's own linear regulation and filtering, and is stable to 5v +/- 0.05 volts and 15v +/- .015v for the TDA1541 DAC is uses.
I agree, I worked for an HiFi repair agent in the UK and some of our designs were excellent, Arcams early gear was good , but this later AV gear was a nightmare to fault find on, Arcams backup to the trade was poor, if you sent one to them it took months before it came back
Dave, I totally agree with technicians not touching modern AV equipment. As a long time consumer of AV equipment since the early 90's to now, I have a love/hate relationship with the technology. It just doesn't last long, but I do love Dolby Atmos.
Don't have anything that modern. Just an old Onkyo and my old plasma tv that is 14 years old. 5 channel. I don't even bother with the sub woofer. It's there but not plugged in. I don't watch enough movies. 2 in the past year. All the money in the world and top gun Maverick.
Simple fix, jack up the cover and slide a new unit under it! You're right, Dave, anything touched by some one else usually indicates a nasty problem. From what I've read, these are decent units when working properly. Looking forward to your next troubleshooting video.
After years of working on tube radios and such (not hi fi), encouraged by watching RUclips, I decided to try to fix my broken Denon AVR type receiver, constructed surprisingly like this unit. The first, obvious issue was the two large filter capacitors were swollen. Simple fix, I thought! Then, with a limited service manual, I attempted to figure out why the caps didn't fix it, and wound up roasting the output transistors of one channel (which I swapped with the unused center channel), and now suspect the bad caps may have led to issues throughout the unit. All those stacked cards, CPU, and DSP stuff made it very difficult to troubleshoot. Many people say "replace all the electrolytic capacitors", but there are hundreds of them in these, so I'm afraid the only use this thing has is to provide parts for another unit with hopefully simpler needs. I knew I was taking a chance, but I've had that unit since the 1990s and it gave me years of enjoyment as a simple stereo receiver, and it's been replaced with a new Yamaha RN-602, so sadly, it won't be missed. I just hope I can find it a home in someone's parts donor pile after I remove the nice new Nichicon capacitors I'd put in it. Yeah, I'll go back to fixing record changers, tube radios, and computers, where it's easier to get parts!
AVR's are the pits. Exactly as you say, accessibility is a problem, and many voltage and signal tests are off-limits. Then to find the parts, obtain the microcontroller that needs a program to run; obtain the program itself and the hardware to upload it to the MCU. I've also noticed a high incidence of seemingly failed analogue switches. Now most analogue switch IC's require digital comms from a master. Has the chip failed or is it not receiving comms? Very often it is a thin quad package located beneath the bottom board with no access panel underneath the chassis. After losing many hours to ambitious troubleshooting (hours I will never get back), I learned my lesson. I turn these repairs away. There has to be more noble ways of living life than repairing AV receivers.
AV receivers are like todays over complex cars, trying to repair them can drain your sanity and wallet very quickly. So much for progress! The gear made in the 70/80's can still be repaired today, and sound better sometimes than these modern multi-everything ones do. I find the in your face wall of sound from them becames a pain to listen to very quickly. Do yourself a favour Dave and put it out of it's misery.
Look at the cap at around 16:30. Legs all corroded, and I bet there's another bad one somewhere causing the logic to misbehave. I had similar issues with leaking caps on a NAD C375 receiver. Most of them where in fact bad, and recapping the whole unit isn't exactly done on a coffee break. Total crap, like most modern equipment.
Before you removed the cover, it was clear this has been tampered with. Someone soldered in two oversized electrolytic capacitors to the DSP board, thicker gauge jumper wires, and left a glob of solder on the legs of an IC chip. That alone tells you to walk away. The amount of IC chips, SMD components, and copper traces in these 2000s AVR make them highly impractical to have serviced. They are great for salvaging parts tho, like high value power caps to install in other projects.
Please do not take this the wrong way but I totally do not agree with you when you say oh those British! All Americans are taught from cradle to grave that America is greatest nation on earth and the land of the free so in many ways you have all been brainwashed into this mantra and believe that anywhere else in the world is inferior and is simply not worth bothering with. There are now generations of Americans and Canadians who simply cannot accept that other parts of the world may be just as advanced or capable as yourselves. Being the massive country that you are there is much about you that is great but also much that is not and this applies to all countries. You are very good at what you know and have been trained and have worked on before but as soon as you are out of your comfort zone, you start to ramble on and on and blame other people for the fact you can not repair the said item. You said yourself that you have never worked on this equipment before and therefore had no idea which is clearly the case for the countless other people who have butchered the equipment. Are you saying it was the British who did this? I have watched your videos for a long time and have learned from you but I have to say that of late you have started rambling on and repeated yourself for much of the videos. It's ok, don't worry, I will be unsubscribing from your channel as I know you will be blocking me in some way but all I ask is, what would you do if someone said something negative about Canada without any form of justification? I am a retired electro mechanical engineer myself and have turned down repairs on equipment from all corners of the world on the basis that they had been tampered with or simply not economically worth it. I have never said "oh well it's from whatever country so it's crap". I have also repaired equipment from those same corners of the world and found there is just as much worthwhile stuff out there.
Things are simple,professional experience overrides any other philosophical thoughts and in electronics repairing services there are no moral dillemmas or emotions about the object being repaired.So do not humanize objects through emotions.
Have you tried poking up without that card in Dave That piece of crap has its own regulators on that card and comes from directly from the AC transformer. I’m happy to stick with Yamaha ha ha Ha
@@GeorgeGeorge-xj2bc What!!?? Not a single word of what you have written makes any sense at all. All I can think is you must have read something like this in a Christmas cracker and you have been busting to use it in some way. Your comment is simply not pertinent to the post I made. The only emotion displayed was towards the fact that the British had been implicated as the cause of the fault and poor workmanship when no British hand had ever been laid upon it. It had clearly been the subject of many butchers before appearing on this video and I am willing to put money on on that not a single one of those butchers were British. If a genius designs a product and a factory full of apes builds it in a very poor manner, does that make the genius responsible for its issues? As an engineer I have never humanised any object and have always judged it on its merits.
Where did I ever say anything that said negative about the british? It's a design that was never designed to be repaired and I've been just as critical of Japanese and American made products. Like anyone else this had to work on this stuff it's not designed to be repaired. If it was a good design it would have had accessible removable panels on the bottom so Tess could be done well the unit was energized and operational. I'm not singling out any country in general because they all do the same thing now it's equipment that is not designed to be repaired it is designed to be built as inexpensively as possible. I happen to be a British ancestry myself.
@@12voltvids As I began my first message to you, "please don't take this the wrong way", I don't mean to be critical of your opinion, we all have our own opinion about everything. The trigger for me was when you put into your title for the video "oh those British". The fact of the matter is even if this was British design, the project is then passed on to the cheapest factory to put a quote in. As we know this is usually China or japan. I like you prize well built and carefully crafted items whatever they may be. Something that is regretfully very rare now. Just as you are fiercely patriotic of your country, so too am I. Britain does still make very good, well engineered products, made on our shores. Sadly there is also a lot of cut price crap but that could be said of many if not all countries. As an engineer myself for many years I have seen a steady decline in standards and pride in manufacture in almost every product we buy and this makes me sad. What makes me more sad however is when we start to call out each other for having substandard products which do not take the poor tech guy into consideration when at the end of the day it is the almighty dollar that dictates how well something is made. As I have stated, I have learned stuff from your many videos and find them entertaining I just feel we should keep nation calling out of these videos as it makes for ill feelings and resentment and your videos are not about this, they are more help and information.
There is a service manual / schematic available (manualslib) but I understand your reluctance to work on it. I have never seen caps stood off the PCB like that, some of which seemed to have components mounted underneath them.
That's the problem with these high end, everything imaginable packed into a single, extremely complex home theater type platform, very similar to a Harman Kardon of the same size and complexity as this Arcam . . . there are so many "safety" trip points lurking about in the circuitry, if any one of them goes out of bounds (temp, voltage or current), it immediately shuts down. Beyond bad caps, or maybe a toasted MOSFET, relatively easy to spot and examine / test, there are many other, more obscure items that could be the culprit, or culprits operating in tandem to create the shutdown condition, not to mention any potential firmware updates that might be relevant. Yeah, endless hours could vanish into this time sink void . . .
I have a Yamaha RX-Z11 that I purchased as not working. Even though the Z11 is much much more complex that the Arcam it's actually somewhat easy to work on, Yamaha put thought into serviceability too. So after a lot of scoping and digging through schematics I worked out that the DC-DC converter that supplies the uP and DSP board failed, someone else repaired that and now the 1.2v main reg on the uP PCB is dead. After that they gave up as the the reg chip is so small and required a SMD hot air station (which i dont have either). I'm in the process of bypassing it with an external reg module im building.
@@GammaSierra Hi, not yet I'm waiting on parts. Now there's a good chance that the micro or other chips are damaged. That's ok as I'll be on the lookout for working unit from the States and swap out the transformer for the 240v one I have. I currently have a RX-Z9 that I've owned from new (and love) so i'm in no hurry.
Harvey! it was only Designed in Cambridge in the UK, then made in the USA like all the Shit! from the 90s onwards, better in the 60s,70s & even some 80s Makes me LOL! when people say 'back in my day' & I got lots of 'old stuff' and its all from the 90s that was only around the corner like it was yesterday 😂🤣👍
@@Ratchet_effect The 90's ha ha not what i would call old :-D I was born in 1966 so i would be in a pram around 1970, prams were hi tech in my day lol :-D. Yep i'm silly.
I sold a LOT of these Arcam units back in the day when I was a partner in a custom electronics design and install business. They did sound great but they ran very hot and proved to be unreliable unfortunately. Later models (eg AVR 250) were much better iirc 🤔
I had an Arcam DT91 which behaved in an erratic way; like this receiver it powered on but wouldn't tune in to anything and half the controls were non-functional. It turned out that the main filter cap (a Rubicon) had gone open and the excessive ripple was upsetting the microprocessor. Once the capacitor was replaced, the unit worked perfectly and still does. I paid £25 on Ebay for it and got Lucky. I wouldn't touch anything of this complexity as it could be hardware or software or, as in my case, one causing the other to malfunction.
I'm at could very well be the case here however once the unit is being into I don't know if there's any other faults that have been created. It's one thing to be the first person into something and you know the only fault is going to be the original fault but once others start poking around you don't know whether there's additional faults and could spend hours and hours chasing multiple problems. Like that akai reel to reel that I wasted 5 hours on and it still won't record. Customer paid me an estimate fee and told me to toss it.
HifiEngine has all the manuals for this "thing", so that shouldn't be the showstopper. But sincing lots of hours into repairing something like this just isn't what I would do. But then again recycling, reusing, repairing, circular economy etc is what it's all about now, so you should really fix this to be in sync with todays world.
I have the manual and have been looking at it for stuff to test. What makes me nervous is unknown damage by others that have already attempted repair. Being a micro controller controlled receiver it could be even software corruption. That's what happened to my harmon kardon. Was having some issues with Dolby digital muting momentarily. Went to the hk site and found a software update that was supposed to fix it. Downloaded the patch ran it followed directions to the letter. Update ran through. All the messages on the screen appeared totally normal. At the end it said to press ok to continue. I pressed ok and that was the last time that 3000 receiver ever worked. It is still sitting in storage. Like this one impossible to test without removing a bunch of boards. I went and bought an Onkyo. It lasted 3 years then the dsp problem which I fixed with halogen lamp. That worked for 2 years and quit again. Found another older Onkyo with a broken hdmi connector. Resoldered it and have been using that one since. When it breaks I have 2 more ready to go. I just use it for home theatre and tv use. For music i have a few systems. The high power system uses a Crest (Peavey) 900 watt amplifier. That one will knock your fillings loose. Now just need some speakers that will actually use that power.
I have a SONY 1000 something or other DB QS unit if I am not wrong... it's built MUCH more beautifully than this unit. The digital board has all Nichicon golden capacitor, all the boards have short ribbon connectors, the front panel is socketed multi-board. All the power MOSFETs stages logically laid out with input connectors and the individual transistors easily accessible. I don't know whether the SONY unit that I have is built to be serviced... what I know it's going to be a heck of a lot easier to work it, at least based on appearance alone as it doesn't remotely resembles - the spaghetti incident - of this AVR.
i had a very very very similar problem with my sony str de997. the unit would freeze shortly after turning on and the problem was with the radio tuner board. as soon as i took that board out, it stopped freezing.
The plasma tv on my bench. It was shutting down when i got it. Since it was mine I took on the challenge and spent about 15 hours digging through that one only to find a shorted inductor on the 37v boost rail for the analog tuner. Removed the coil and replaced it with a jumper and it works to this day. Won't tune above catv channel 27 which is fine because my in house analog distribution system doesn't go beyond that and it doesn't have a digit tuner anyway. It was a throw away, as nobody would spent what it would have cost to fix.
Um, did anyone else notice that capacitor with the green, badly corroded legs? The one near the first frayed wire. Perhaps this amp really needs a re-cap??
@@DaXande135 Correct. It increases voltage and has enough current that high peek transients are handled without clipping. My home amp is a Crest vs900. Crest is now Peavey and I know you have heard of them. 450 watts per channel it is so clean at all volume levels. With a great preamp it is amazing.
Arcam had really gone downhill by this point. It's now owned by Samsung I believe. That receiver looks a mess inside. They moved all their production to China and it all went downhill. Although not all British stuff is made like this!
The answer is simple.They get as much as they can out of bs equipments sold under a famous branded name without any service support and that all folks.These machines were the starting point for something that today is the common practice.Just buy and throw away.
I'm disappointed with the build quality of most AV receivers in the $500-$2000 price range, tbh. They haven't improved a great deal over the years. Most of them using the exact same circuit for the power amps, using Sanken transistors etc., which is fine in itself, but it's always the same terrible quality single-layer main PCB. And the big stack of boards, usually horizontal, that you can't easily test anything on while the unit is powered up. As it happens, I bought an Anthem (Canadian) receiver recently which I repaired (popped surround channel transistors). The internal design of the Anthem is almost the same as certain models of Arcam. It turns out that Arcam is now owned by Harman, and Harman is a division of Samsung. Harman (and technically Samsung) now also own... AKG, AMX, Arcam,[6] Bang & Olufsen Automotive, Becker, BSS Audio, Crown, dbx, DOD Electronics, DigiTech, Harman Kardon, Infinity, JBL, Lexicon, Mark Levinson, Martin, Revel, Soundcraft and Studer. lol I don't quite get why the Anthem receivers are almost the same inside as some Arcam gear, though. I can't find the direct connection. Some of the JBL pro amps are the same design, too. So I guess the British Arcam is now kind of... a little bit Canadian? lol The Anthem gear has a rather high MSRP, even though it's practically the same inside as some Arcam models from a few years ago. The only real difference is some nice room correction software, mic, and stand. Maybe some better DACs. btw, I repaired the popped amp channel on the Anthem with the help of... an Arcam service manual. The amp circuit and part numbers were almost identical, just the designators were different. I couldn't get hold of a schematic for any of the newer Anthem stuff. It's getting a bit crazy how many companies are being absorbed by larger corporations. Soon, all restaurants will be Taco Bell.
The IC with the puck on it looks like the volume control / input switching IC, btw. They tend to get zapped easily by ESD, or maybe nearby lightning etc. Or sometimes just from the small zap you get between an RCA and a cable TV coax or something. Since they removed that board, I'd guess that the volume IC is dead / dying, so the main MCU can't communicate with it properly, hence it often freezes. I think the Arcam would have been worth repairing if it decoded any of the newer lossless surround formats like Dolby TrueHD and DTS-MA. (mainly used on Blu Rays). But sadly, any older stuff goes obsolete fast now, which I think is a huge waste. They could easily make them more modular, so you can install a DSP or HDMI board upgrade. I still have my old Denon AVC-A11SR, which I've been hanging onto for over 15 years, but I need to let it go now. I'll either give it away, or sadly have to dump it. It was almost $2,000 in 2002, now it's only worth $100 collection-only. lol
@@electronash I just modded a nice old dycaco Pat 4 preamp today. As you probably remember the pap4 had three line level inputs tape tuner and spare and three low level inputs for phono tape head and special. Kind of useless today's world where you typically only have one turntable but lots of line-in devices. So it was mod Time for That. Rewire the riaa preamp so that it only is dealing with the photo signal and the other two inputs go directly in as line level but of course they have equalization on them which had to be defeated. I'll probably put that video up tomorrow. It was a so-called fully restored unit. Have to laugh at what fully restored means to some people in this case it was cutting the big main filter cap and putting three electrolytics on it and then removing the power cord and putting a computer style power connector on the back with a grounded plug that was a "fully restored" preamp. Not! Fully restored would be doing those caps as well as changing all of the non-shielded audio lines going in and out between the Jack panel and the preamp board and the input switch with properly shielded cables and possibly changing a couple of other capacitors there's not many there's only two or three on the preamp board. That's a full restoration in my eyes. But I wasn't doing a full restoration either I was just doing an inspection control cleaning and adding extra line inputs so now it has five line and one photo input. They sound really good though those preamps are even though they're 55 years old as good as they got and will stand up to anything else.
@@12voltvids I've seen more hilarious "audiophile" stuff on Techmoan's channel recently, including a device that shaves an angle into the edge of a CD. Another device that "demagnetizes" CDs. lol (aluminium inner layer in a CD. Yes, I thought the same thing. lol) I see that most AV receivers these days barely have more than three analog RCA inputs, which I guess isn't too surprising. Those often don't have a true "Direct" mode bypass either. Many will just choose to always sample the analog inputs with an ADC, then go through the DSP. For many of those reasons, I've been slowly building my own AV receiver. I'm using Class-D amp modules, as the better chips have truly caught up with a best Class AB amps now. Class D is so much more efficient, lightly, more compact, as they barely need much of a heatsink. (some of the best-measuring amps right now are Class-D. And not massively expensive. Like the Purifi modules.) I'll be doing a design for the HDMI board soon, but I only managed to find ONE set of switcher HDMI chips which support 4K with audio extraction, and which have source code available. Seems the manufacturers have a monopoly on that stuff for a while longer. (I used to replace the build-in mains cable on some of my amps with an IEC socket, just because the included cables were generally awful, and I hated the fact the cables was always attached before.)
Well that's just it. There are so many things that will trip it into a shutdown. Over voltage, under voltage, over current, excess ripple, current or voltage leakage. Where do you go? It seems to take a command for a court seconds when powered up then everything locks up. Hours and hours could be spent. I am sure you remember that pioneer from earlier in the year. That one took about 11 hours and the guy paid me about 700 to repair it because he just had to have it. I don't know many willing to put that type of money into a receiver. It the case of the pioneer it had sentimental value to the owner. I always tell people don't get emotionally attached to a piece of electronics because eventually they will fail.
👍👍😎✌️🤟 Pioneer Elite receiver retired after 5 years because remote would stop communicating with unit. It would work again after a hard reset of the receiver. No one would look at it, including Pioneer! Disgusting! $3000.00 flushed!
Had the same experience with my Harman kardon that I spent $3,000 on. After 3 years started doing strange things. Harman kardon said update the firmware so I updated the firmware didn't fix it Harman kardon said time to buy a new one thanks for your $3,000 and F you. It's still sitting in my storage unit on repaired it's been there since 2009
Insignia audio is onkyos high end. I have one that was given to me. A bunch of bad solder connections repaired and it works fine. Same with many of the older Sony receivers. Not bad for the age.
Dave , what could cause no colour on a vhs dvd recorder , theres colour on the osd , and on the dvd side, i changed the heads for known good ones , no difference , its a toshiba dvr60, i think in the states these machines are known as magnavox, but theyre the same inside . Any help appriciated , ty
On VHS the color is not recorded in the same frequency that lives in the video signal. It is converted down from the sub carrier frequency which is 3.579 for ntsc and 4.43 for pal down to 629 kilohertz and recorded on to the tape. On playback that 629 kilohertz signal needs to be converted back up to the original sub carrier frequency. If the heads are on backwards in other words 180° out you will have no color because of the way the color is recorded as it's inverted on one field. The heads have a different azimuth. One is +7° and the other is minus 7°. So if the heads are rotated 180°, the -7 head will be reading its track when the VCR thinks it's the +7 head because the tracks are laid so close together they overlap. Since the color is inverted for the odd fields both color signals will be 180° out of phase and typically will not convert up to the correct frequency and you end up with a black and white picture. I remember back in the day when I was servicing VCRs I got a VCR in I had no color the customer did not tell me when it was brought in that he had replaced ahead himself I need done such a skillful job at replacing the head including using alcohol to clean the little circuit board on top that there was no indication that they had had been replaced. I spent literally hours on this machine hours. Pulled my hair out could not figure out what the hell the problem was. Phone the customer to get some more information found out that his son had replaced the head because it was worn out. Light bulb went on pulled the head off reversed it bam color. He ended up paying for that $70 color I see that I had changed to no avail and a bunch of labor. His total repair bill was about $500. remember though this was back when VCRs were a thousand bucks plus. I never did tell him that that's why it had no color the problem was the color I see that's what he was told the problem however was caused by his son thinking he was going to save some money. the kicker to this is had he brought the machine to me with Warren heads the repair Bill probably would have been about 150 bucks. We had a sign hanging in the shop they said labor $80 per hour if you watch $120 per hour if you help $150 per hour. In this case we actually got to put that sign into practice. But I still wasted probably two and a half to three hours troubleshooting a machine that did not need to be troubleshot. Of course when the machine was brought in had they said we tried changing the head ourself that would have been the first thing I would have tried and it's repairable probably would have been around 50 bucks maybe 75.
@@12voltvids Forgive me for being a novice , but what exactly do you mean by the heads being reversed 180 degrees , I cant see on this machine how it would be possible to incorrectly reinstall the heads , although somebody has definetly been in this machine before I got it as theres missing screws ect. Theres a circuit board on top of the heads with a ring magnet and coils going all the way round it , i presume this is the motor for the heads?, this can be turned and it affects the picture if the allighnment isnt right , but on this machine its not possible to install this the wrong way round because of how its hard wired in. Maybe this is the part you mean ? , i made a mistake with the model number its an rdxv60kb, i found the schematic , theres an ic that deals with the video processing , and i found 3 or 4 open caps around it which are on the AGC( automatic gain control ?) And also the "fbc-det" pins , which looking at the schematic , seem to be linked inside the ic to something marked "chrominance signal process" . The same caps on a known good board from the same model machine read around 10 ohm esr...so im going to replace those next and see what happens , iv read somewhere online that a failed crystal oscillator at the video ic could cause this issue , so i could try changing the crystal (i dont have a scope) just a multimeter. The ic itself looks pretty difficult to swap, it looks really beefy thick and like it would take alot heat to get it off the board , so im trying to eliminate other possibilities first. Sorry again for my lack of knowledge Dave , im actually an electrician by trade , im still learning , thankyou very much for the advice .
@@reacey i obviously don't know the chassis you have from the model number but on VHS with a removable upper drum that is soldered to the rotary transformer by pins that stick up through a circuit board it is possible to install backwards. Other designs no. Caps in chroma circuit, a bad crystal or bad chroma process ic is where to look.
@@12voltvids so the problem turned out to be the audio and video processing ic itself. I took one from a donor board , its a LA71750, i found it very difficult to remove , red super glue underneath it , broke some traces off which i had to repair with fine wire. Not an easy job. The machine is working perfect now , there was slight choppyness to the picture as well as no colour before i changed this ic, and i noticed it was getting rather hot . Thanks again for taking the time to reply and help me out . Ive learned a fair bit from this repair .
They won't touch it with all the amateur work that's been done on it and it most likely too old. Arcam is now owned by Samsung so unlikely they'd even be interested.
@@12voltvids ...I should have been more specific. Radio station transmitters are extremely complicated, but at least the boards are placed in neat patterns where they can be pulled in a moments notice without clusters of untidy wiring in the way. Unfortunately, that type of design for home consumers would be unaffordable and take too much space.
@@paulzehner9419 broadcast cameras and vtrs the same. Pull the card and plug it into an extender to work on it. But a removable base would make servicing so much easier. On an expensive unit a few screws would go a long way but noooo that's too much to ask for.
I would suspect first the toroidal tranformer for primary windings thermal fuse blown but in this case there is no one left in the town for transformer repair or rewinding services so nothing can be done about transformers.Else these kind of amplifiers carrying an outrageous and totally useless complexity overpriced just for garbage electronics and garbage is the place that they belong.Just wasted money and a bunch of surround speakers for my @@@ and the wife after so many years still wonders WTF.
I’ve had an AVR300 since new in 2007. Zero issues and still sounds superb 👍
And your point is?
@@Rendon276 that I’m fortunate to have had excellent reliability and performance from my near-vintage gear.
And your point is?
Given your user experience, your point is valid. But I would argue that AVR's, on the whole, are not reliable. The premise I will offer for this argument is that many of the AVR's that arrived at my bench were operated as intended, without abuse from the user. They just died spontaneously without due cause from its external environment. This naturally raises the issue of reliability. You've been fortunate; many have not.
My AVR300 is still working perfectly after nearly 20 years. The AV input board was replaced a few years ago but other than that it's brilliant.
Mad in the uk, this garbage is made in china
Same, zero issues since I bought new in 2007 💪
You're smart, experienced and wise. Good call Dave!
Don't just walk away from this one, RUN.
After I saw that board you took out of the bubble wrap I wouldn't have written it off. Kudos for you for trying! Nice watch tan by the way ;)
I share your ideas about multichannel receivers and the commercial and technical policy of these self proclaimed high end brands.
I also admire you finally had a comprehensive look into this monster, as it was the typical case of the obviously tampered receiver, wich is the ultimate no in most technical service.
You also know when you have any problem with one on these "designers" brands, they will generally tell you the costs to repair any malfunction is excessive du to newest models AND will propose these with newer more extensive design, with new DA converter, IP radios capacities, a new color screen or remote control... and generally even offer you some special price to achieve this (they pretend to be generous with a 10% discount, but they will never really cut in their huge margins!). Car dealers share the same policy, but they're more generous!
Most of these brands offer you a classy exclusive look but when it comes to multichannel or other complex tech, share complex and delicate technology they generally will never repair. The basic problem is they pretend to use custom made patent protected circuits, but in fact use massively specialized IC and technologies from different brands, to finally never communicate clearly and propose functional datasheets with updates, as you can have multiple variations depending on circuits availability or price... All these components and raiser boards are supposed to communicate and must function together, but no one has ever conceived any diagnostic bus like any other complex assembly, imagine repairing your car without OEBD tools nowadays! Most also share poor quality discrete components, massive use of corrosive glue, bad connectors, ringing transformers, because even if they can be conceived in Europe or US, they are finally made in lo cost Chinese factories, with the poorest actual standards: Look at this 2007 amp, and you get a mess of wires, corrosive stuff like the one used to glue a probably useless cooler on a IC, poor insulation, and visibly multiple technicians attempts.
I found this: For the AVR300 you do this in the engineering menu, RDSinfo + Preset tune together on the front panel takes you into this menu use ^V arrows to navigate to the restore option, make sure you leave the RC5 codes alone otherwise it will stop responding to the remote control, set restore to yes then exit using Ok on the exit option.
I had a pioneer VSX digital 7.1 home theater receiver that started doing the AMP ERR and shutting down randomly. I paid well over 700 for this unit because I wanted something to last and it met all of my criteria including the sound quality you get with pioneer. It was just out of warranty and I treated the unit well by adding a fan to keep it cool and running 8 ohm speakers with it like it claimed. I found out the hybrid digital amplifier chips were bad causing DC to leak into the outputs and they were unobtanium at the time so I smashed it into little bits and sorted the metals out of it for scrap.
I feel your pain. I purchased a Yamaha DRX-1 DVD recorder new back in early 2000's for over AU$2000. Lasted 3 months and then the laser died. Waited 2 months for it to be fixed by the service center, work for another year and then died again. Turns out that it was a Philips re-badge and not made by Yamaha at all and the actual problem was poorly written firmware that did the laser power calibration each time a recordable disk was inserted damaging the laser slowly. After that I purchased a Sony RDR-HX900 HDD DVD recorder with extended warranty for AU$1700 and it still works today almost 20 years later.
Years ago I repaired a Pioneer SC-LX73 with a blown digital amp and was able to get parts but that was in Australia.
That's why in my main system I have a fully analogue Kenwood amp from 1990 with discrete amplifier chips and a real input selector switch. It sometimes needs contact cleaning (every 10 years or so), but it has no complicated ICs that could eventually fail.
not all British stuff is this bad, I have a vintage Meridian D600 active speaker system, it's a work of art inside. Each driver has it's own discrete amplifier stage, and the preamp board and equalization is all done with discrete components. The digital input/control board is powered off an unregulated transformer output and has it's own linear regulation and filtering, and is stable to 5v +/- 0.05 volts and 15v +/- .015v for the TDA1541 DAC is uses.
I agree, I worked for an HiFi repair agent in the UK and some of our designs were excellent, Arcams early gear was good , but this later AV gear was a nightmare to fault find on, Arcams backup to the trade was poor, if you sent one to them it took months before it came back
Dave, I totally agree with technicians not touching modern AV equipment.
As a long time consumer of AV equipment since the early 90's to now, I have a love/hate relationship with the technology. It just doesn't last long, but I do love Dolby Atmos.
Don't have anything that modern. Just an old Onkyo and my old plasma tv that is 14 years old. 5 channel. I don't even bother with the sub woofer. It's there but not plugged in. I don't watch enough movies. 2 in the past year. All the money in the world and top gun Maverick.
Simple fix, jack up the cover and slide a new unit under it! You're right, Dave, anything touched by some one else usually indicates a nasty problem. From what I've read, these are decent units when working properly. Looking forward to your next troubleshooting video.
After years of working on tube radios and such (not hi fi), encouraged by watching RUclips, I decided to try to fix my broken Denon AVR type receiver, constructed surprisingly like this unit. The first, obvious issue was the two large filter capacitors were swollen. Simple fix, I thought! Then, with a limited service manual, I attempted to figure out why the caps didn't fix it, and wound up roasting the output transistors of one channel (which I swapped with the unused center channel), and now suspect the bad caps may have led to issues throughout the unit. All those stacked cards, CPU, and DSP stuff made it very difficult to troubleshoot. Many people say "replace all the electrolytic capacitors", but there are hundreds of them in these, so I'm afraid the only use this thing has is to provide parts for another unit with hopefully simpler needs. I knew I was taking a chance, but I've had that unit since the 1990s and it gave me years of enjoyment as a simple stereo receiver, and it's been replaced with a new Yamaha RN-602, so sadly, it won't be missed. I just hope I can find it a home in someone's parts donor pile after I remove the nice new Nichicon capacitors I'd put in it. Yeah, I'll go back to fixing record changers, tube radios, and computers, where it's easier to get parts!
Pull the transformer, filter caps, heatsink and then take it recycling.
That's what I was thinking, but pull the power transistors first.
Don't blame other people if you can't repair something, it is what it is.
"Don't blame a careless driver for wrecking a car beyond repair..." Okaaaaaaaaaay.
Walk away ? Run away, run away quick !
I have 3 ARCAMS.fixed.the sound is fantastic from 1 kW transformer. long deep bass
AVR's are the pits. Exactly as you say, accessibility is a problem, and many voltage and signal tests are off-limits. Then to find the parts, obtain the microcontroller that needs a program to run; obtain the program itself and the hardware to upload it to the MCU. I've also noticed a high incidence of seemingly failed analogue switches. Now most analogue switch IC's require digital comms from a master. Has the chip failed or is it not receiving comms? Very often it is a thin quad package located beneath the bottom board with no access panel underneath the chassis. After losing many hours to ambitious troubleshooting (hours I will never get back), I learned my lesson. I turn these repairs away. There has to be more noble ways of living life than repairing AV receivers.
Run don't walk.
I am glad i got out when i did.
i got a Harman AVRmkii still works after all these years
AV receivers are like todays over complex cars, trying to repair them can drain your sanity and wallet very quickly.
So much for progress!
The gear made in the 70/80's can still be repaired today, and sound better sometimes than these modern multi-everything
ones do.
I find the in your face wall of sound from them becames a pain to listen to very quickly.
Do yourself a favour Dave and put it out of it's misery.
Look at the cap at around 16:30. Legs all corroded, and I bet there's another bad one somewhere causing the logic to misbehave.
I had similar issues with leaking caps on a NAD C375 receiver. Most of them where in fact bad, and recapping the whole unit isn't exactly done on a coffee break. Total crap, like most modern equipment.
I have noticed that one as well!
Before you removed the cover, it was clear this has been tampered with. Someone soldered in two oversized electrolytic capacitors to the DSP board, thicker gauge jumper wires, and left a glob of solder on the legs of an IC chip. That alone tells you to walk away. The amount of IC chips, SMD components, and copper traces in these 2000s AVR make them highly impractical to have serviced. They are great for salvaging parts tho, like high value power caps to install in other projects.
Oh, the fact that the dsp board was out of the unit wasn't your first clue?
Please do not take this the wrong way but I totally do not agree with you when you say oh those British!
All Americans are taught from cradle to grave that America is greatest nation on earth and the land of the free so in many ways you have all been brainwashed into this mantra and believe that anywhere else in the world is inferior and is simply not worth bothering with.
There are now generations of Americans and Canadians who simply cannot accept that other parts of the world may be just as advanced or capable as yourselves.
Being the massive country that you are there is much about you that is great but also much that is not and this applies to all countries.
You are very good at what you know and have been trained and have worked on before but as soon as you are out of your comfort zone, you start to ramble on and on and blame other people for the fact you can not repair the said item.
You said yourself that you have never worked on this equipment before and therefore had no idea which is clearly the case for the countless other people who have butchered the equipment. Are you saying it was the British who did this?
I have watched your videos for a long time and have learned from you but I have to say that of late you have started rambling on and repeated yourself for much of the videos.
It's ok, don't worry, I will be unsubscribing from your channel as I know you will be blocking me in some way but all I ask is, what would you do if someone said something negative about Canada without any form of justification?
I am a retired electro mechanical engineer myself and have turned down repairs on equipment from all corners of the world on the basis that they had been tampered with or simply not economically worth it. I have never said "oh well it's from whatever country so it's crap".
I have also repaired equipment from those same corners of the world and found there is just as much worthwhile stuff out there.
Things are simple,professional experience overrides any other philosophical thoughts and in electronics repairing services there are no moral dillemmas or emotions about the object being repaired.So do not humanize objects through emotions.
Have you tried poking up without that card in Dave That piece of crap has its own regulators on that card and comes from directly from the AC transformer. I’m happy to stick with Yamaha ha ha Ha
@@GeorgeGeorge-xj2bc What!!??
Not a single word of what you have written makes any sense at all.
All I can think is you must have read something like this in a Christmas cracker and you have been busting to use it in some way.
Your comment is simply not pertinent to the post I made.
The only emotion displayed was towards the fact that the British had been implicated as the cause of the fault and poor workmanship when no British hand had ever been laid upon it.
It had clearly been the subject of many butchers before appearing on this video and I am willing to put money on on that not a single one of those butchers were British.
If a genius designs a product and a factory full of apes builds it in a very poor manner, does that make the genius responsible for its issues?
As an engineer I have never humanised any object and have always judged it on its merits.
Where did I ever say anything that said negative about the british? It's a design that was never designed to be repaired and I've been just as critical of Japanese and American made products. Like anyone else this had to work on this stuff it's not designed to be repaired. If it was a good design it would have had accessible removable panels on the bottom so Tess could be done well the unit was energized and operational. I'm not singling out any country in general because they all do the same thing now it's equipment that is not designed to be repaired it is designed to be built as inexpensively as possible. I happen to be a British ancestry myself.
@@12voltvids As I began my first message to you, "please don't take this the wrong way", I don't mean to be critical of your opinion, we all have our own opinion about everything.
The trigger for me was when you put into your title for the video "oh those British".
The fact of the matter is even if this was British design, the project is then passed on to the cheapest factory to put a quote in.
As we know this is usually China or japan.
I like you prize well built and carefully crafted items whatever they may be. Something that is regretfully very rare now.
Just as you are fiercely patriotic of your country, so too am I.
Britain does still make very good, well engineered products, made on our shores.
Sadly there is also a lot of cut price crap but that could be said of many if not all countries.
As an engineer myself for many years I have seen a steady decline in standards and pride in manufacture in almost every product we buy and this makes me sad.
What makes me more sad however is when we start to call out each other for having substandard products which do not take the poor tech guy into consideration when at the end of the day it is the almighty dollar that dictates how well something is made.
As I have stated, I have learned stuff from your many videos and find them entertaining I just feel we should keep nation calling out of these videos as it makes for ill feelings and resentment and your videos are not about this, they are more help and information.
You gave it all you had, multi channel no parts complex circuitry any faults it goes into safety mode
There is a service manual / schematic available (manualslib) but I understand your reluctance to work on it. I have never seen caps stood off the PCB like that, some of which seemed to have components mounted underneath them.
Arcam? More like Arcan't!
That's the problem with these high end, everything imaginable packed into a single, extremely complex home theater type platform, very similar to a Harman Kardon of the same size and complexity as this Arcam . . . there are so many "safety" trip points lurking about in the circuitry, if any one of them goes out of bounds (temp, voltage or current), it immediately shuts down. Beyond bad caps, or maybe a toasted MOSFET, relatively easy to spot and examine / test, there are many other, more obscure items that could be the culprit, or culprits operating in tandem to create the shutdown condition, not to mention any potential firmware updates that might be relevant. Yeah, endless hours could vanish into this time sink void . . .
I have a Yamaha RX-Z11 that I purchased as not working. Even though the Z11 is much much more complex that the Arcam it's actually somewhat easy to work on, Yamaha put thought into serviceability too. So after a lot of scoping and digging through schematics I worked out that the DC-DC converter that supplies the uP and DSP board failed, someone else repaired that and now the 1.2v main reg on the uP PCB is dead. After that they gave up as the the reg chip is so small and required a SMD hot air station (which i dont have either). I'm in the process of bypassing it with an external reg module im building.
So, were you able to repair your Yamaha?
@@GammaSierra Hi, not yet I'm waiting on parts. Now there's a good chance that the micro or other chips are damaged. That's ok as I'll be on the lookout for working unit from the States and swap out the transformer for the 240v one I have. I currently have a RX-Z9 that I've owned from new (and love) so i'm in no hurry.
Dave how dare you call this british product crap...... Shit is the correct word lol :-D
😁🤣
Harvey! it was only Designed in Cambridge in the UK, then made in the USA like all the Shit! from the 90s onwards, better in the 60s,70s & even some 80s
Makes me LOL! when people say 'back in my day' & I got lots of 'old stuff' and its all from the 90s that was only around the corner like it was yesterday 😂🤣👍
@@Ratchet_effect The 90's ha ha not what i would call old :-D
I was born in 1966 so i would be in a pram around 1970, prams were hi tech in my day lol :-D.
Yep i'm silly.
Wouldn't it be more British to call it "rubbish"?
Yeah that would work if you was being polite to the item in question IMO
It's almost like they build the stuff to purposely break.
I sold a LOT of these Arcam units back in the day when I was a partner in a custom electronics design and install business. They did sound great but they ran very hot and proved to be unreliable unfortunately. Later models (eg AVR 250) were much better iirc 🤔
I had an Arcam DT91 which behaved in an erratic way; like this receiver it powered on but wouldn't tune in to anything and half the controls were non-functional. It turned out that the main filter cap (a Rubicon) had gone open and the excessive ripple was upsetting the microprocessor. Once the capacitor was replaced, the unit worked perfectly and still does. I paid £25 on Ebay for it and got Lucky. I wouldn't touch anything of this complexity as it could be hardware or software or, as in my case, one causing the other to malfunction.
I'm at could very well be the case here however once the unit is being into I don't know if there's any other faults that have been created. It's one thing to be the first person into something and you know the only fault is going to be the original fault but once others start poking around you don't know whether there's additional faults and could spend hours and hours chasing multiple problems. Like that akai reel to reel that I wasted 5 hours on and it still won't record. Customer paid me an estimate fee and told me to toss it.
that's gross - maybe a mouse held a house party in that thing.
At 18.15 it's a philips IC which is rarely seen 🤔
HifiEngine has all the manuals for this "thing", so that shouldn't be the showstopper.
But sincing lots of hours into repairing something like this just isn't what I would do.
But then again recycling, reusing, repairing, circular economy etc is what it's all about now,
so you should really fix this to be in sync with todays world.
I have the manual and have been looking at it for stuff to test. What makes me nervous is unknown damage by others that have already attempted repair. Being a micro controller controlled receiver it could be even software corruption. That's what happened to my harmon kardon. Was having some issues with Dolby digital muting momentarily. Went to the hk site and found a software update that was supposed to fix it. Downloaded the patch ran it followed directions to the letter. Update ran through. All the messages on the screen appeared totally normal. At the end it said to press ok to continue. I pressed ok and that was the last time that 3000 receiver ever worked. It is still sitting in storage. Like this one impossible to test without removing a bunch of boards. I went and bought an Onkyo. It lasted 3 years then the dsp problem which I fixed with halogen lamp. That worked for 2 years and quit again. Found another older Onkyo with a broken hdmi connector. Resoldered it and have been using that one since. When it breaks I have 2 more ready to go. I just use it for home theatre and tv use. For music i have a few systems. The high power system uses a Crest (Peavey) 900 watt amplifier. That one will knock your fillings loose. Now just need some speakers that will actually use that power.
I have a SONY 1000 something or other DB QS unit if I am not wrong... it's built MUCH more beautifully than this unit. The digital board has all Nichicon golden capacitor, all the boards have short ribbon connectors, the front panel is socketed multi-board. All the power MOSFETs stages logically laid out with input connectors and the individual transistors easily accessible.
I don't know whether the SONY unit that I have is built to be serviced... what I know it's going to be a heck of a lot easier to work it, at least based on appearance alone as it doesn't remotely resembles - the spaghetti incident - of this AVR.
i had a very very very similar problem with my sony str de997. the unit would freeze shortly after turning on and the problem was with the radio tuner board. as soon as i took that board out, it stopped freezing.
The plasma tv on my bench. It was shutting down when i got it. Since it was mine I took on the challenge and spent about 15 hours digging through that one only to find a shorted inductor on the 37v boost rail for the analog tuner. Removed the coil and replaced it with a jumper and it works to this day. Won't tune above catv channel 27 which is fine because my in house analog distribution system doesn't go beyond that and it doesn't have a digit tuner anyway. It was a throw away, as nobody would spent what it would have cost to fix.
@@12voltvids Smart!
Same reason the Brits got out of making computers .. they couldn't figure out how to make them drip oil!
Um, did anyone else notice that capacitor with the green, badly corroded legs? The one near the first frayed wire. Perhaps this amp really needs a re-cap??
2:29 JFC Did some guy just pull out the soldering iron and just go ham on that thing?
Well my only complaint is you probably shouldn't have spent 20 min on this complaining about it was time to move on.
I was making sure i didn't want to open Pandora's box.
These units are very good audio wise and if you can fix it. I guarantee it will sound better than all the other stuff you have.
A good amp doesn't sound, it's supposed to amplify the inout signal as neutral as possible.
@@DaXande135 Really thanks for the wisdom.
I dunno about that my big 900 watt crest professional amp is the best sounding amplifier I have heard.
@@DaXande135
Correct. It increases voltage and has enough current that high peek transients are handled without clipping. My home amp is a Crest vs900. Crest is now Peavey and I know you have heard of them. 450 watts per channel it is so clean at all volume levels. With a great preamp it is amazing.
Arcam had really gone downhill by this point. It's now owned by Samsung I believe.
That receiver looks a mess inside. They moved all their production to China and it all went downhill. Although not all British stuff is made like this!
David where your watch
I have the bigger AVR 550 one it works perfect its dolby atmos to
Good for you,however not a very useful comment.🤔
@@brucepickess8097 Just like your comment and most are spam any way
Glad that's not mine.
They don't want you to repair them. They want you to replace them so they can make more $$$.
Exactly.
A good decision to not get too involved in the thing…not worth the time nor the effort. Thanks for posting the truth, Dave
@@SergZak2023 now you know why nobody does this anymore.
The answer is simple.They get as much as they can out of bs equipments sold under a famous branded name without any service support and that all folks.These machines were the starting point for something that today is the common practice.Just buy and throw away.
I'm disappointed with the build quality of most AV receivers in the $500-$2000 price range, tbh.
They haven't improved a great deal over the years. Most of them using the exact same circuit for the power amps, using Sanken transistors etc., which is fine in itself, but it's always the same terrible quality single-layer main PCB.
And the big stack of boards, usually horizontal, that you can't easily test anything on while the unit is powered up.
As it happens, I bought an Anthem (Canadian) receiver recently which I repaired (popped surround channel transistors).
The internal design of the Anthem is almost the same as certain models of Arcam.
It turns out that Arcam is now owned by Harman, and Harman is a division of Samsung.
Harman (and technically Samsung) now also own...
AKG, AMX, Arcam,[6] Bang & Olufsen Automotive, Becker, BSS Audio, Crown, dbx, DOD Electronics, DigiTech, Harman Kardon, Infinity, JBL, Lexicon, Mark Levinson, Martin, Revel, Soundcraft and Studer. lol
I don't quite get why the Anthem receivers are almost the same inside as some Arcam gear, though. I can't find the direct connection. Some of the JBL pro amps are the same design, too.
So I guess the British Arcam is now kind of... a little bit Canadian? lol
The Anthem gear has a rather high MSRP, even though it's practically the same inside as some Arcam models from a few years ago. The only real difference is some nice room correction software, mic, and stand. Maybe some better DACs.
btw, I repaired the popped amp channel on the Anthem with the help of... an Arcam service manual.
The amp circuit and part numbers were almost identical, just the designators were different.
I couldn't get hold of a schematic for any of the newer Anthem stuff.
It's getting a bit crazy how many companies are being absorbed by larger corporations. Soon, all restaurants will be Taco Bell.
The IC with the puck on it looks like the volume control / input switching IC, btw.
They tend to get zapped easily by ESD, or maybe nearby lightning etc.
Or sometimes just from the small zap you get between an RCA and a cable TV coax or something.
Since they removed that board, I'd guess that the volume IC is dead / dying, so the main MCU can't communicate with it properly, hence it often freezes.
I think the Arcam would have been worth repairing if it decoded any of the newer lossless surround formats like Dolby TrueHD and DTS-MA. (mainly used on Blu Rays).
But sadly, any older stuff goes obsolete fast now, which I think is a huge waste. They could easily make them more modular, so you can install a DSP or HDMI board upgrade.
I still have my old Denon AVC-A11SR, which I've been hanging onto for over 15 years, but I need to let it go now.
I'll either give it away, or sadly have to dump it. It was almost $2,000 in 2002, now it's only worth $100 collection-only. lol
@@electronash
I just modded a nice old dycaco Pat 4 preamp today. As you probably remember the pap4 had three line level inputs tape tuner and spare and three low level inputs for phono tape head and special. Kind of useless today's world where you typically only have one turntable but lots of line-in devices. So it was mod Time for That. Rewire the riaa preamp so that it only is dealing with the photo signal and the other two inputs go directly in as line level but of course they have equalization on them which had to be defeated. I'll probably put that video up tomorrow. It was a so-called fully restored unit. Have to laugh at what fully restored means to some people in this case it was cutting the big main filter cap and putting three electrolytics on it and then removing the power cord and putting a computer style power connector on the back with a grounded plug that was a "fully restored" preamp. Not! Fully restored would be doing those caps as well as changing all of the non-shielded audio lines going in and out between the Jack panel and the preamp board and the input switch with properly shielded cables and possibly changing a couple of other capacitors there's not many there's only two or three on the preamp board. That's a full restoration in my eyes. But I wasn't doing a full restoration either I was just doing an inspection control cleaning and adding extra line inputs so now it has five line and one photo input. They sound really good though those preamps are even though they're 55 years old as good as they got and will stand up to anything else.
@@12voltvids I've seen more hilarious "audiophile" stuff on Techmoan's channel recently, including a device that shaves an angle into the edge of a CD.
Another device that "demagnetizes" CDs. lol
(aluminium inner layer in a CD. Yes, I thought the same thing. lol)
I see that most AV receivers these days barely have more than three analog RCA inputs, which I guess isn't too surprising.
Those often don't have a true "Direct" mode bypass either. Many will just choose to always sample the analog inputs with an ADC, then go through the DSP.
For many of those reasons, I've been slowly building my own AV receiver.
I'm using Class-D amp modules, as the better chips have truly caught up with a best Class AB amps now. Class D is so much more efficient, lightly, more compact, as they barely need much of a heatsink.
(some of the best-measuring amps right now are Class-D. And not massively expensive. Like the Purifi modules.)
I'll be doing a design for the HDMI board soon, but I only managed to find ONE set of switcher HDMI chips which support 4K with audio extraction, and which have source code available. Seems the manufacturers have a monopoly on that stuff for a while longer.
(I used to replace the build-in mains cable on some of my amps with an IEC socket, just because the included cables were generally awful, and I hated the fact the cables was always attached before.)
@@electronash Lol, you dont know how to use the three seashells.
@@mgrsdgfsdafsdgrsdgfsdg6980 Oh, the Taco Bell reference. lol
I am shure, the front stereo amps would sound beautiful, but the IC says no.
Well that's just it. There are so many things that will trip it into a shutdown. Over voltage, under voltage, over current, excess ripple, current or voltage leakage. Where do you go? It seems to take a command for a court seconds when powered up then everything locks up. Hours and hours could be spent. I am sure you remember that pioneer from earlier in the year. That one took about 11 hours and the guy paid me about 700 to repair it because he just had to have it. I don't know many willing to put that type of money into a receiver. It the case of the pioneer it had sentimental value to the owner. I always tell people don't get emotionally attached to a piece of electronics because eventually they will fail.
👍👍😎✌️🤟 Pioneer Elite receiver retired after 5 years because remote would stop communicating with unit. It would work again after a hard reset of the receiver. No one would look at it, including Pioneer! Disgusting! $3000.00 flushed!
Had the same experience with my Harman kardon that I spent $3,000 on. After 3 years started doing strange things. Harman kardon said update the firmware so I updated the firmware didn't fix it Harman kardon said time to buy a new one thanks for your $3,000 and F you. It's still sitting in my storage unit on repaired it's been there since 2009
Do you like Alnico speakers?
What do u think of insignia or Sony as a brand pretty good or crap ?
Insignia audio is onkyos high end. I have one that was given to me. A bunch of bad solder connections repaired and it works fine. Same with many of the older Sony receivers. Not bad for the age.
@@12voltvids thanks I have an old insignia and I love it to death I hope it never dies
@@brandonbrandon749 Integra, not Insignia
Dave , what could cause no colour on a vhs dvd recorder , theres colour on the osd , and on the dvd side, i changed the heads for known good ones , no difference , its a toshiba dvr60, i think in the states these machines are known as magnavox, but theyre the same inside . Any help appriciated , ty
On VHS the color is not recorded in the same frequency that lives in the video signal. It is converted down from the sub carrier frequency which is 3.579 for ntsc and 4.43 for pal down to 629 kilohertz and recorded on to the tape. On playback that 629 kilohertz signal needs to be converted back up to the original sub carrier frequency. If the heads are on backwards in other words 180° out you will have no color because of the way the color is recorded as it's inverted on one field. The heads have a different azimuth. One is +7° and the other is minus 7°. So if the heads are rotated 180°, the -7 head will be reading its track when the VCR thinks it's the +7 head because the tracks are laid so close together they overlap. Since the color is inverted for the odd fields both color signals will be 180° out of phase and typically will not convert up to the correct frequency and you end up with a black and white picture. I remember back in the day when I was servicing VCRs I got a VCR in I had no color the customer did not tell me when it was brought in that he had replaced ahead himself I need done such a skillful job at replacing the head including using alcohol to clean the little circuit board on top that there was no indication that they had had been replaced. I spent literally hours on this machine hours. Pulled my hair out could not figure out what the hell the problem was. Phone the customer to get some more information found out that his son had replaced the head because it was worn out. Light bulb went on pulled the head off reversed it bam color. He ended up paying for that $70 color I see that I had changed to no avail and a bunch of labor. His total repair bill was about $500. remember though this was back when VCRs were a thousand bucks plus. I never did tell him that that's why it had no color the problem was the color I see that's what he was told the problem however was caused by his son thinking he was going to save some money. the kicker to this is had he brought the machine to me with Warren heads the repair Bill probably would have been about 150 bucks.
We had a sign hanging in the shop they said labor $80 per hour if you watch $120 per hour if you help $150 per hour. In this case we actually got to put that sign into practice. But I still wasted probably two and a half to three hours troubleshooting a machine that did not need to be troubleshot. Of course when the machine was brought in had they said we tried changing the head ourself that would have been the first thing I would have tried and it's repairable probably would have been around 50 bucks maybe 75.
@@12voltvids Forgive me for being a novice , but what exactly do you mean by the heads being reversed 180 degrees , I cant see on this machine how it would be possible to incorrectly reinstall the heads , although somebody has definetly been in this machine before I got it as theres missing screws ect. Theres a circuit board on top of the heads with a ring magnet and coils going all the way round it , i presume this is the motor for the heads?, this can be turned and it affects the picture if the allighnment isnt right , but on this machine its not possible to install this the wrong way round because of how its hard wired in. Maybe this is the part you mean ? , i made a mistake with the model number its an rdxv60kb, i found the schematic , theres an ic that deals with the video processing , and i found 3 or 4 open caps around it which are on the AGC( automatic gain control ?) And also the "fbc-det" pins , which looking at the schematic , seem to be linked inside the ic to something marked "chrominance signal process" . The same caps on a known good board from the same model machine read around 10 ohm esr...so im going to replace those next and see what happens , iv read somewhere online that a failed crystal oscillator at the video ic could cause this issue , so i could try changing the crystal (i dont have a scope) just a multimeter. The ic itself looks pretty difficult to swap, it looks really beefy thick and like it would take alot heat to get it off the board , so im trying to eliminate other possibilities first. Sorry again for my lack of knowledge Dave , im actually an electrician by trade , im still learning , thankyou very much for the advice .
@@reacey i obviously don't know the chassis you have from the model number but on VHS with a removable upper drum that is soldered to the rotary transformer by pins that stick up through a circuit board it is possible to install backwards. Other designs no. Caps in chroma circuit, a bad crystal or bad chroma process ic is where to look.
@@12voltvids thanks alot for the advice. Very much appriciated , getting back on it shortly .
@@12voltvids so the problem turned out to be the audio and video processing ic itself. I took one from a donor board , its a LA71750, i found it very difficult to remove , red super glue underneath it , broke some traces off which i had to repair with fine wire. Not an easy job. The machine is working perfect now , there was slight choppyness to the picture as well as no colour before i changed this ic, and i noticed it was getting rather hot . Thanks again for taking the time to reply and help me out . Ive learned a fair bit from this repair .
What happened to your Casio?!
The insulation is falling apart
Wow I just seen junk of a life time! Glad I never bought one of those!
Plug play throw away
it's a boat anchor
9:15
Get the owner to send it back to arcam
They won't touch it with all the amateur work that's been done on it and it most likely too old. Arcam is now owned by Samsung so unlikely they'd even be interested.
Something wrong with us British?
Yes
replace chip cs434003
Terrible unit best to give up on it poor construction .
Everything electronic these days is disposable junk
In terms of self repairability - sadly yes...
Looks like a poorly engineered pile of contiguous junk! It ranks an A+ for the meaning, "Disposable".
It's more the service unfriendly construction that is the fail here. The design itself isn't bad, but the way it is put together is an "F".
@@12voltvids ...I should have been more specific. Radio station transmitters are extremely complicated, but at least the boards are placed in neat patterns where they can be pulled in a moments notice without clusters of untidy wiring in the way. Unfortunately, that type of design for home consumers would be unaffordable and take too much space.
@@paulzehner9419 broadcast cameras and vtrs the same. Pull the card and plug it into an extender to work on it. But a removable base would make servicing so much easier. On an expensive unit a few screws would go a long way but noooo that's too much to ask for.
I would suspect first the toroidal tranformer for primary windings thermal fuse blown but in this case there is no one left in the town for transformer repair or rewinding services so nothing can be done about transformers.Else these kind of amplifiers carrying an outrageous and totally useless complexity overpriced just for garbage electronics and garbage is the place that they belong.Just wasted money and a bunch of surround speakers for my @@@ and the wife after so many years still wonders WTF.
It has power. The transformer is fine.