This nice Trixtereo Trixette came in for a full refurbishment. It had been in the owners’ loft for years, not seen the light of day.
Quick check over and powered it up with current limiter on via a variac. After about 20 seconds, all we had was an uncontrollable hum. Looked like there was no smoothing capdensor functioning at all.
Quite a few things were wrong. The BSR crystal pickup TC8S was totally dead. No output at all. The deck, UA12 was all gummed up and I eventually found a couple of springs missing which lead me on a dance trying to get the thing to work. I am not a great lover of the UA12, much prefer the UA8, which was a nice deck. One of the annoying faults with this UA12 was lack of tension on the turn table idler. This is achieved by a wound spring on the speed change mechanism and awkward to adjust. The UA8 has a little spring on the idler arm that can be fettled much easier. So, with he deck sorted, now for the amplifier section.
2 chassis. One with the power supply and main amp, another with the pre amp and tone controls. The pre amp has an ECC83, allowing for a tone stack of bass and treble. The main amp having 2 x ECL82s and an EZ80. All the capdensors were duff. The wax Hunts were all 200K resistors and the reservoir block, not a Farad in site. All were changed. Then we had a look at all the little carbon resistors. All apart from 2 were so far out that nothing would have worked. Again, that lot replaced. Once all reassembled and a NOS Sonatone stereo cartridge fitted, we had a play. And, wonderous sounds. Quite punchy output from both speakers which clip on the sides of the cabinet for transporting. Left it on for half an hour, then shock horror, all volume vanished. Out with the amplifier chassis and found that we had no HT going to the pre amp chassis. After a bit of mucking around, found a bit of earth braid from a signal cable was touching the decoupled HT feed. With that removed, all back to playing well.
Now to clean the cabinet.
