Resurrection complete.
After nearly a year of fruitless search for someone to fix my ailing Victor tt 101, I found the man of my audio dreams. His name is Dave Brown. I must have emailed 20-30 odd turntable repair shops and/or persons and had nothing to show for it until I found Dave’s cool website. He specializes in synthesizers (I think), but he’s a pro in the highest sense of the word, and took ‘all of’ 7 hours to diagnose and fix what others said was unfixable or too time consuming. He had never seen this turntable before, yet with service manual in hand he was able to do what seemed to me, and not just me, impossible. And yet he’s not a pro in the sense that he runs a shop (he used to, I believe); he now does repairs out of interest and by request only. He initially declined, citing the difficulty of accessing the victor’s circuit boards while powering the motor (a well grounded concern it turns out), but I’m a good beggar ☺.
On my understanding of what he told me, the boards used on the victor are ‘eyelet boards’. The solder connections through such boards tended to suffer cracking. This is what happened to mine. Some of the connections are heat sensitive, and that’s why I experienced the partial resurrection a few weeks back after leaving the unit on. The cracking is not necessarily evident to the naked eye, but after resoldering the boards, the table now works flawlessly. It should be noted that changing the power supply capacitors didn’t fix any of my troubles, but some of them appeared to be leaking so it was a good idea to do so.
He warns that not all is repairable: if the quartz clock responsible for the pitch control is broken, then most likely you have a doorstop.
So, in regards to that, there is some danger in living with this direct drive table, but the world is made less dangerous with Dave in it.
Gotta go find that Mahler now.
After nearly a year of fruitless search for someone to fix my ailing Victor tt 101, I found the man of my audio dreams. His name is Dave Brown. I must have emailed 20-30 odd turntable repair shops and/or persons and had nothing to show for it until I found Dave’s cool website. He specializes in synthesizers (I think), but he’s a pro in the highest sense of the word, and took ‘all of’ 7 hours to diagnose and fix what others said was unfixable or too time consuming. He had never seen this turntable before, yet with service manual in hand he was able to do what seemed to me, and not just me, impossible. And yet he’s not a pro in the sense that he runs a shop (he used to, I believe); he now does repairs out of interest and by request only. He initially declined, citing the difficulty of accessing the victor’s circuit boards while powering the motor (a well grounded concern it turns out), but I’m a good beggar ☺.
On my understanding of what he told me, the boards used on the victor are ‘eyelet boards’. The solder connections through such boards tended to suffer cracking. This is what happened to mine. Some of the connections are heat sensitive, and that’s why I experienced the partial resurrection a few weeks back after leaving the unit on. The cracking is not necessarily evident to the naked eye, but after resoldering the boards, the table now works flawlessly. It should be noted that changing the power supply capacitors didn’t fix any of my troubles, but some of them appeared to be leaking so it was a good idea to do so.
He warns that not all is repairable: if the quartz clock responsible for the pitch control is broken, then most likely you have a doorstop.
So, in regards to that, there is some danger in living with this direct drive table, but the world is made less dangerous with Dave in it.
Gotta go find that Mahler now.