gazman
Active Member
Found a RX-V870 at the tip, took it home, it went into protection mode as soon as it powered on. From web reading this sounded like bad transistors and a lot of work to fix, so I put it away. It was in pretty good condition though. No dings on the outside.
Fast forward a bit. Made a dim-bulb tester the other weekend, got the RX-V870 out as a 'known-bad' to test the tester. Have to admit I'd kind of dismissed it as BPC a bit - its 1990s, a lot of black. But its heavy.
Since it was there.... There was a lot of dust inside. Whole dust-mice. Blew them out, tried it again - and it worked. No protection mode. DC was a bit off - up toward 60mv on one channel, needed tweaking on the rest (three settings, one for the centre channel).
Ran it for a day, cleaned it properly, with some deoxit. It's running perfectly. Really nice amp. It's grunty. It has the 'amplified wire' Yamaha thing going on. Now I look, other people have said this too - I just hadn't thought to check. I'm really pleased - it's probably the best score I've had. For now I've got it in the kitchen, where a CA-610 usually is.
I can't believe someone threw out a reciever because it was dusty
The bulb behind the LCD panel is blown - but I think that was my cleaning, from memory it did work - so it isn't even that. Looks like they're a couple of bucks on the web.
And the preset ambience modes - Jazz Bar, Concert Hall and the rest - are absolutely *&@#$ awful. Have to be heard to believed - "Jazz Bar" kind of turns a solid mid-fi amp into a tinny ipod dock. It's really an achievement - like they let the apprentice design them, knowing no-one who bought "natural sound" would actually use them. The bad apprentice. The one they didn't let do gluing.
And it has this weird hole for a second transformer, it looks like. But from the manual, the top-end model doesn't have two transformers either - so it's just a hole. And the PCBs are blue. That doesn't look right, somehow.
But yeah, I was pleased. And unlike pretty much everything else, it shouldn't need recapping for another ten years. I can just use it!
Fast forward a bit. Made a dim-bulb tester the other weekend, got the RX-V870 out as a 'known-bad' to test the tester. Have to admit I'd kind of dismissed it as BPC a bit - its 1990s, a lot of black. But its heavy.
Since it was there.... There was a lot of dust inside. Whole dust-mice. Blew them out, tried it again - and it worked. No protection mode. DC was a bit off - up toward 60mv on one channel, needed tweaking on the rest (three settings, one for the centre channel).
Ran it for a day, cleaned it properly, with some deoxit. It's running perfectly. Really nice amp. It's grunty. It has the 'amplified wire' Yamaha thing going on. Now I look, other people have said this too - I just hadn't thought to check. I'm really pleased - it's probably the best score I've had. For now I've got it in the kitchen, where a CA-610 usually is.
I can't believe someone threw out a reciever because it was dusty
The bulb behind the LCD panel is blown - but I think that was my cleaning, from memory it did work - so it isn't even that. Looks like they're a couple of bucks on the web.
And the preset ambience modes - Jazz Bar, Concert Hall and the rest - are absolutely *&@#$ awful. Have to be heard to believed - "Jazz Bar" kind of turns a solid mid-fi amp into a tinny ipod dock. It's really an achievement - like they let the apprentice design them, knowing no-one who bought "natural sound" would actually use them. The bad apprentice. The one they didn't let do gluing.
And it has this weird hole for a second transformer, it looks like. But from the manual, the top-end model doesn't have two transformers either - so it's just a hole. And the PCBs are blue. That doesn't look right, somehow.
But yeah, I was pleased. And unlike pretty much everything else, it shouldn't need recapping for another ten years. I can just use it!