Took my Levinson amp in for repair

There are caps available for sale currently on this site - just search for Mark Levinson. You would want to check on authenticity, but they sound like the real deal.

Audiogon member "Renjy651" has commented on this thread that he does ML cap replacements and has access to equivalent or better caps than the original ML caps.

While all of the above posts are interesting, it seems the best course of action is to immediately take the amplifier to a Mark Levinson authorized repair shop. If it were me, I would rush my amplifier to the closest Levinson authorized repair shop for an opinion and an estimated written cost to repair. One question to ask is what damage, if any, did the leaking caps do to the wiring, other parts, etc. Unfortunately, you might have to ship it to another location (I do not know).

After reading everyone comments above, my sense is you cannot sue the dealer that you first took the amplifier to.

I do not know the age of your amplifier but I would be careful about spending big dollars for its repair. The problem is if something 'major" goes wrong today, other things might break tomorrow. Depending on the repair cost, and the opinion of the repair technician, I would ask about replacing your current broken Levinson amp with another amplifier assuming the retailer can give you a reasonable trade in on your old one. If your amplifier is very old, I question making expensive repairs. Please let us know what happens.

The caps were already blown (the noise coming out of your left channel). The smoke may be caused by the leak that spilled over some parts during transport (or when it got flipped over) and caused a short somewhere. It is a well documented issue with the 300 series amps.

I had firsthand experience with the amp and Levinson "service" and reported my experience a few years back. The Levinson tech told me it was a design issue (capacitor driven too hard). They had switched capacitor supplier a few times to try to get better caps that could handle the load without blowing up. My amp got serviced 3 times through an 8-year period.

A few years back, after all these complaints started surfacing, Mark Levinson extended the warranty on the 300 series amps for another 5 years. You may want to contact them to see if your amp is still under warranty. If not, the cost will be $2k or more. Check first as shipping may be separate and will surely add another $500 (both ways).

FrankC