Sad Day at Elroy's

A sad day, indeed.

A couple days ago I turned my system on, as usual. turned it up a little and only the left channel started playing, so, hmmm. I shut it off, checked all my connections. turned it on and the same thing. I turned the source button off and cranked the balance all the way to the channel that wasnt working but I could barely hear anything our of the "bad channel".

Soooo, I removed my DAC, and used the optical on my yammi, Pre-amp. and viola it worked great. so I took the DAC out and pulled the cover off thining I might see a burned spot or something that would be glaring to a novice, but I did not see anything that looked out of place.

So the next day I turn the system on and bam, no left channel again. So I switch CD players to a panasonic DVD/CD player and use a Coxial cable into my preamp, thinking that it may just be the marantz cd player acting up. so I swap them and Viola, it works, but ,,,,, after about 20 minutes or so, I didnt notice until I swapped cd's that the left channel went out again.

So now I'm crappin my pants cause its either the amp, or the pre. Well to make a long story short, I unplugged everything and brought it to work, dingus and I fooled with it, cleaned the pots on the amp. and switched the IC's right to left, left to right, and both channels on the amp work. so

Something is wrong with my pre-amp. we looked for a fuse, but didnt see one. so here I sit.

and to top it off I got that Teac X-2000r sitting there needing belts. I guess when it snows, its usually frozen underneath. crap.

elroy

damn!! Elroy, hope its not serious!!

Hope it is nothing serious and an easy fix.

ya, thats why we looked for a fuse, but didnt see one. oh well. gotta find someplace up here in the seattle area, does anybody have any recomendations.

elroy

Did you tried in another input, like aux or tape? Doesn't it have two preamp outputs? Did the same happens in the two pre outs?

Bummer! It's interesting how it's intermentant (sp). It seems like it might be a thermal issue. You might want to try spraying parts of the pre-amp board with something to cool it down and see if the channel comes back. Just a thought

I'm no tech but I try like heck before I see mine. My 2270 would cut a channel and I traced to a bad solder joint. I used a non-conductive probe and gently pressed around the boards until the sound came back. Then I re-flowed everything and it is fine.

....meanwhile you have the chance to try out cd-direct.

When it was hooked to the DAC, that was run with IC's to the CD input stage. When I thought the problem was the DAC, I removed it. This Pre, has its own onboard DAC, so I went CoaX, and Optical. and on both it worked briefly and then it cut out. I can hear sound in the dead channel, just barely. so its not dead, but it is.

elroy

So.......start looking for obvious stuff like dry solder joints (check all of the solder joints with a magnifying glass) bulging caps, discoloured diods and resistors etc...

sounds like something is not liking getting warm.

+1
The 20 minute or so time delay is a big clue here.

I don't have the schematics so i don't know if this is a dum question...we are talking about a Yamaha preamp right? If i remember doesn't almost every Yamaha have two switching on relays after capacitor is loaded? After we power on the unit, i mean. If so, that's the first thing imo you must check. Of course without the schems we're only guessing, but that's for sure one point deserves to be checking.

that seemed to happen the first two times, but after that the one channel was the only one working properly.

Give John at Northwest Audio a call.
206-728-0369
He is very well recommended up here.
He has worked on a few of my pieces.
Good luck.

This post has been edited by Rat44 on December 20, 2008 06:01 pm