Juanbanzai
Active Member
Hi.
Hoping someone can push me in the right direction for trying to troubleshoot a Realistic STA-2100D that I picked up at Salvation Army. Unfortunately, the service manual doesn’t have a section that says, “No output due to stupidity, try replacing X.”
First, even though this thing has some water/rust damage to the chassis, it WAS working just fine although the left channel was a tad weaker than the right. Since the tone controls and everything were playing fine, I elected to recap the protection board, power supply board, relay board, and the two main power caps. Up until I replaced the power caps, the unit came back up and sounded fantastic. So I decided to finish up by swapping out the power caps, but I made the horrible mistake of putting the first one in very late at night when I couldn’t sleep and wanted to putter around to clear my head. See where this is going?
Long story short, even after checking my work dozens of times and finding nothing wrong, I installed one of the power caps backwards (the one I installed at 2:30 in the morning) and immediately blew the 8-amp fuse on powering the receiver back up. No smoke was let out, and none of the four fuses on the power supply board burned out; just the main fuse. With my head FINALLY clear, I found the mistake, reversed the cap, and powered the unit back up. I was relieved when the relays clicked and the unit came out of protection.
But now when I put a signal into the receiver, I’m getting nothing but an occasional “blurp” out of the left channel, and the right channel is horrifically distorted if I turn the volume up past a whisper. The first thing that’s coming to mind is that I blew the final output transistors on both amplifier boards, but if that’s the case, why would the unit come out of protection? My other thought is that I destroyed one of the new electrolytic filter caps. I’ve honestly never made this kind of stupid mistake before so I have no idea how tough those caps are when they’re installed incorrectly. I’m wondering if I should put the original Elna caps back in to see what happens.
So hopefully, someone can give me a better idea on where to begin finding the problem(s). And the lesson we learned is... having a bad day with lack of sleep do not mix with electronics.
Many thanks.
Aaron
Hoping someone can push me in the right direction for trying to troubleshoot a Realistic STA-2100D that I picked up at Salvation Army. Unfortunately, the service manual doesn’t have a section that says, “No output due to stupidity, try replacing X.”
First, even though this thing has some water/rust damage to the chassis, it WAS working just fine although the left channel was a tad weaker than the right. Since the tone controls and everything were playing fine, I elected to recap the protection board, power supply board, relay board, and the two main power caps. Up until I replaced the power caps, the unit came back up and sounded fantastic. So I decided to finish up by swapping out the power caps, but I made the horrible mistake of putting the first one in very late at night when I couldn’t sleep and wanted to putter around to clear my head. See where this is going?
Long story short, even after checking my work dozens of times and finding nothing wrong, I installed one of the power caps backwards (the one I installed at 2:30 in the morning) and immediately blew the 8-amp fuse on powering the receiver back up. No smoke was let out, and none of the four fuses on the power supply board burned out; just the main fuse. With my head FINALLY clear, I found the mistake, reversed the cap, and powered the unit back up. I was relieved when the relays clicked and the unit came out of protection.
But now when I put a signal into the receiver, I’m getting nothing but an occasional “blurp” out of the left channel, and the right channel is horrifically distorted if I turn the volume up past a whisper. The first thing that’s coming to mind is that I blew the final output transistors on both amplifier boards, but if that’s the case, why would the unit come out of protection? My other thought is that I destroyed one of the new electrolytic filter caps. I’ve honestly never made this kind of stupid mistake before so I have no idea how tough those caps are when they’re installed incorrectly. I’m wondering if I should put the original Elna caps back in to see what happens.
So hopefully, someone can give me a better idea on where to begin finding the problem(s). And the lesson we learned is... having a bad day with lack of sleep do not mix with electronics.
Many thanks.
Aaron