My restored SX-1980

Friday, May 4, 2012

Pioneer SX-1980 Recap and Restoration!

I have finally got one, the beast. A friend of mine got a line on this one, scratchy controls was all it had. He asked my opinion of it and should he get it, you can imagine what my response was. GET IT! He bought it, but found it could not fit anywhere in his system, so he offered it to me, and long story short I got it and he shipped it here. If you have never seen one of these in person, you can't appreciate how big these things are. They, are, massive! And try moving one around a lot, it will cause you to have a hernia, 78 pounds, 22 1/4" wide, 19" deep and 8 1/4" high.

I'm going to be doing a complete restore to it, recap, full cleaning from top to bottom, the works. Here are some before photos, I'll be adding more as I get into it.





Some before photos of the boards, more will be added as I get to them

EQ (Phono) amp board


Tone amp board


Flat amp board


Filter amp board


Power amp board (there are two of them and they look exactly the same, except one has the two big caps on the left instead of the right, this one is of the left amp board)


Power supply board


And after recap!

EQ (Phono) amp


Tone amp


Flat amp


Filter amp


Power amp (this one is the right hand amp board)


Power supply board (Note: I miscounted the caps in the list I created and came up two short, so you can see two caps that are still original, I've got those on order.)


And it works perfectly! Powered up on the DBT (Dim Bulb Tester) with no problems, offset and bias set with no problems whatsoever and when I played it for the first time, glorious sound from both channels, no scratchiness or cutting out at all.

I still have to replace the two caps on the power supply I missed, the SS relay, the two 35v zener diodes and the tuner boards, but other then that this thing is ready to rock and roll! I'll be posting pics soon with it back together.

Update 08/11/12: I replaced the 35v zeners, the two caps and the soft start relay a month ago but some how forgot to update the post to that affect! The regulator mod discussed here was also implemented


New relay top and side, note it is a top mount, so I will have to exchange cases with the old relay so it will fit on the board.



New vs old


And the new relay in place!


Also got the tuner recapped and fully aligned!

Tuner board before:


And after!


This is the APC board which controls the quartz lock

Before:


And after!


 And here are some photos of it with everything put together!