Beogram 4002 (5513): New Gold Plated RCA Plugs

Most Beograms have corroded DIN or RCA plugs at this point in time, and so it is a great idea to replace these connectors with new gold plated units. This particular Beogram 4002 (5513) was originally outfitted with RCA connectors.

I usually use modern quality big all metal plugs as replacements, but in this case an additional boundary condition was that the Beogram will be connected to a Beolab 5000, which has all connectors in a small compartment integrated into the bottom of its enclosure. While this is very elegant and hides the cables under the unit, it also is very restrictive with regard to what types of plugs can be used.

I finally settled on some all metal plugs made by Rean that are gold plated. They are short enough to fit into the Beolab compartment. However, like so many of these plugs they have gargantuan exit openings for the cables, which may be a concession to the modern trend to use very thick cables (which in my opinion is another snake oil concept to extract money from unsuspecting enthusiasts, but that is a different topic...;-). I did not like the looks of this, and so I decided to design small 3D printed inserts that would solve this issue and also allow me to color-code the plugs in an elegant way:

Then I soldered the plugs on:

This is how they look assembled:

Beolovely! Here is an impression of plugging them into my Beolab 5000:

A close fit, but leaving just enough room to get the cables out. The final job on this Beogram is to restore the hood which has a few bad scratches.