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RE: The Monster Amp

Don

Thanks for introducing the "death" capacitor into the discussion, I was wondering when it would rear it's menacing little head. My early 70's Fender Super Reverb has one (0.047 uF/600 V). It also has a death/ground switch which can switch the cap to either side of the AC power input, so it relates to the present discussion. Standard operating procedure (by a 70's rock musician with no electrical knowledge assumed): plug in Stratocaster to amp: turn up volume; choose the position of the ground switch which has the least 60 Hz AC hum. Okay, a Fender guitar amp ain't hi-fi, but prior to the 70's we had the dawn of the stereo age. It was well known among my Dad's hi-fi club in the early 60's that to avoid hum problems you should measure any piece of equipment with a VOM connected to chassis and a ground to check for residual AC voltage. The correct orientation of the AC plug was the one which gave the lowest reading. So this certainly did matter back in the day, even to those people whose intellects were so far below certain posters here as theirs are to the squirrel.

As to the original post, online pix of the Sansui AU-517 show it has no tuner. So it would have typically been mated with a separate tuner, a record player, and at my house a couple of R2R tape decks (with 4 MXR noise reduction units), 16 X 5 mixer, and a cassette deck all through 100dB horn speakers. Orienting all of the AC plugs to the worst case position verified by the VOM would have guaranteed, at the very least, a higher degree of hum as heard through the horns.

It's unlikely that anyone would cut the power plug off a functioning AU-517 just to repair another piece of equipment that just needed a plug. Looking for a death cap issue would be the first thing I would check, followed by the power filter caps. If any of the output transistors are blown, they are probably unavailable now, making the amp a parts resource unit. These are the most likely reasons for the missing plug.

I put this here because I liked your posts (Dave's and SF's too) better than that Ken D^3's posts.

Paul

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