Thursday 24 January 2013

A Quick Kenwood Repair

I did a trip with my friend Clint out to Pure Sound today. We took in a Sansui amp, a Dynaco SCA-80Q and a Harman Kardon 630. I had had a look at the H/K and the Dynaco and they were both items that I did not want to take on trying to repair. The fellow there is a real audio technician; I'm just a hack.

Later I went back to Clint's shop and dropped off a Kenwood KD990 turntable which was one of my faster turntable repair turnarounds. Thankfully it was simple as the circuitry in this would have been tricky to work with. In fact it was not much worse than the best case scenario of a blow fuse, but it did not have fuses.

Kenwood KD990

It turned out to be (probably) just dirty contacts or sticky switches. It would not power on at first, and after opening it up and checking to see if it was getting power to the circuit board at the brown/red/black wires near the top, I simply detached the 2 circuit boards that the microswitches attach to and cleaned them with contact cleaner. I also pulled the black ribbon cables out of their sockets and cleaned those contacts.

Kenwood KD990 2

Back together it went and it worked!

It's a very nice and high quality turntable, weighing about 14 kilos. Unfortunately this one is a bit beat up which is quite the shame. The piano gloss black finish is not my favourite as it easily shows marks and this has more than a few of those. It also is missing a dustcover, and had an ugly Sansui headshell with an even uglier Stanton DJ cartridge on it.

Kenwwod KD990 3

When I took it back to Space Lab, I moved the cartridge to a better looking shell that was at least closer to the original model (not shown). I do like the tonearm with it's machined look. The antiskate is an interesting variation on the weight on a fishing line concept.

Kenwwod KD990 4

Anyway I did not get to to play with this one too much. It worked and sounded fine on the single record I played on it, but then it went back to the shop to go on display. And I am on to the next project, a NAD 7020!

NAD 7020

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