The Beogram 4000 that I am restoring right now had a badly corroded and poorly installed DIN 5 plug. Obviously not the original plug. Here are a couple pictures of the sorry state of this plug:
I think the dangling black lead may have been an attempt to reduce some humming issues (no surprise, considering the way this plug was installed...;-). Besides this strange construction, one of the signal leads was also disconnected due to a sad soldering job.
I cut off the plug and prepared the leads for the new plug:
This picture shows the advantage of DIN connections over RCA: The entire cable and connectors are double shielded. Each lead is shielded by the signal ground lead and then there is an outer shield that connects the enclosures of amplifier and turntable. That way the shielding is complete, which gives the best defense against EMI. RCA usually only have a single shield via the signal ground. That is why there is usually a separate wire that connects the amplifier and turntable system/enclosure grounds.
Then I soldered it on:
And this is how it looks with the shield on:
Beogolden I'd say!
The final step of refurbishing the signal path was to install a switch that allows connecting signal and system grounds. This is a convenient features if there is a hum when connecting to RCA inputs via an adapter.
Switch to the left (as shown) and the grounds are connected. Switch to the right and the grounds are disconnected as in the original configuration.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments and suggestions are welcome!