Beogram 4002 (5523): Replacement of Corroded RCA Plugs

The Beogram 4002 (5523) that I am restoring right now was outfitted with RCA plugs and a grounding wire instead of the standard DIN 5 connector. As usual the plugs and the grounding terminal were grimy and corroded:

I replaced the RCA with all-metal gold plated plugs and I installed a new grounding terminal:

For some reason these nice compact RCA plugs do not come with a color coding, so a while back when I started using them in my restorations I designed 3D printed inserts that close off the back of the plugs and give them a distinguishing mark for the left and right channels:

On to the final adjustments and a test drive of this lovely Beogram!

Beogram 4002 (5513): Installation of New Gold Plated RCA Plugs

No Beogram 4002 restoration is complete without replacing the original DIN or RCA plugs. The original plugs are usually a bit corroded since they were not gold plated. It is a great idea to install modern all metal plugs with gold plated terminals. This increases protection against EMI interference and also ensured low contact resistance to let those small MMC20 signals travel to your amplifier unimpeded. This gives an impression of the original RCA plugs that were on the Beogram 4002 (5513) that I am restoring right now:

Pretty grim...I cut them off and installed nice Amphenol plugs with a full metal body and plated contacts:

And fully assembled:

Very nice! 

Unfortunately, this Beogram also had its grounding wire shortened:

What is it about cutting off cables?? A significant number of Beograms that found my bench in recent years had severed cables, either the power cord or the output cables. How about just curling them up into a neat coil and leaving them alone if they are too long?? Oh well, I replaced the cable fragment with a new pristine 16 gauge wire matching the RCA cables in length. All good again!

Beogram 4002 (5513): New Gold Plated DIN Plug

After replacing the output relay in the Beogram 4002 (5513) that I am currently finishing up it was time to also get rid of the corroded DIN5 plug. This is how the original plug looked like:

I installed a quality Rean DIN5 with gold plated terminals. Here are a few impressions. This shows the cable prepped for installation:

This shows the installed cable. Space is pretty tight inside these DIN5s. Especially keeping the signal and system grounds separated is challenging:

This shows the plug assembled:

Pretty! Good to know that the precious vinyl signals can now travel to the amplifier unimpeded!

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.