Among other things...
There are only 3 of the small(est) boards inside the PL4000 that matter, the RIAA Phono Amp, Logic Board and the Tone Amplifier. The rest of them are junk that gets bypassed when you put the Peak Unlimit, Active Equalizer and Correlate in the OUT position.
These 3 boards are all straight Class A amplifiers, simple gain circuits that rely on discrete transistors, TIS93 and 97.
The coupling of the volume pot to the Tone Amplifier is critical. If a poor connection exists between the 2, you get a nice wall-wall 48KHz square wave output that will blow all the fuses in your amp in a heartbeat.