Replacing Capacitors, I Don’t Wanna!

I'm using almost 50yo stuff that has never been touched but cleaning and adjustments. It still sounds wonderful! While some of the capacitors might have drifted, they still should all be in spec. The only way to know is to measure all of them. Doubt you would really even want that done unless something is wrong.

From what I have been told, it's usually the power caps that wear out first. Sadly they are also the most expensive and sometimes hard to find.

Just measured the caps on my crossovers with my 35yo speakers, they were all in spec but all over the place alone with the resistors. But sadly not the same from left to right. I'm going to recap my XO's soon. The reason was the L/R are not sounding the same, right was a little more defined, left was a bit brighter.

I just picked up a Mark Levinson no 27 amplifier from a client I believe the amp is from 1989-1990 before Levinson was booted and company bought off...

After testing it one channel sounds lifeless, no bass, tinny... I took it to the repair shop and was quoted $2200 for a full recap...

Im good at soldering so and the amp was free so I decided to see if I could fix it myself..

So far I have replaced the big main 45000uF caps and the 2200uF caps, after that I tested and it sounds amazing BUT I started tapping these other 8 caps on the amp stage and it starts going in and out, so now I'm in the process of looking for replacements, so far the biggest challenge is finding the parts, they are difficult to acquire and most are not available so I'm trying for stuff that is close in rating and values and size but it's been challenging. Good news is I think some Mundorf audio grade caps will work to replace those 8 bad caps, but they are higher uF and shorter, but I think they will work 

So far I've spent $400 and it will probably be another $200-$300 but this amp was $3500 back in 1989 which is like $12k in today's money and it sounds great.

send it back to the manufacturer.....you'll get it back perfect

If it ain’t broke…

don’t fix it…

I've had 50-year-old gear that's been laying dormant for decades power right up and play beautiful music on our test bench.  I've also had pieces literally catch on fire (moments after I shot off an email to let the customer know their equipment was ready to be picked up).

Borderline, aging components are risky and not worth catching the entire neighorhood on fire.  But, it does sound to me in this case that the capacitor swap is a bit premature based on the published life expectancy of the caps.