A guy who heard that I worked on gear gave me a ring and asked if I would be interested in buying a used Sansui receiver and speakers he was no longer using. He bought them in Germany back in the early 80's, and brought them back to the US.. He was moving and didn't want to tug the gear around. Apparently the receiver wasn't working right and he would sell them to me for $60. After working on a bunch of Phase Linear, I thought it might be nice to work on a different topography. A couple buddies of mine always raved how much they liked their Sansui receivers, so I told the guy OK. I figured I could go through the receiver, fix whatever, get my money back, and get a cheap lesson in Sansui electronics. He brought them over and I about fell out of my chair. It was a 990DB, the holy Grail of Sansui receivers. And it looked mint other than the usual dust and fingerprints kinda stuff.
I couldn't get the money out of my wallet fast enough.
After the usual dim bulb test and checking the dc offset, I found it was exhibiting the usual dirty pot symptoms. I opened her up, and cleaned the quarter inch of dust out of it, replaced the fuses, set the Bias, which was way out, zeroed the DC offset and cleaned all the pots. I was able to set the DC Offset and Bias to perfect factory settings. All the lights worked as well.
I fed an mp3 player into the Aux input and hooked up some small memorex bookshelf speakers. My God. I don't recall ever hearing anything with such splendid separation and sweetness. I don't mean to swear, but holy shit. I haven't even hooked it up to good speakers and hi res input. It sounds like someone built a cross between a Phase Linear and a Marantz. I'm gonna have a hard time letting go of this one. My buddies weren't kidding.
I just thought I'd share this with the house. I'll share some pics when I get the cover back on. Right now I'm just enjoying listening to it, I'll get the cover on tomorrow.. LOL
I couldn't get the money out of my wallet fast enough.
After the usual dim bulb test and checking the dc offset, I found it was exhibiting the usual dirty pot symptoms. I opened her up, and cleaned the quarter inch of dust out of it, replaced the fuses, set the Bias, which was way out, zeroed the DC offset and cleaned all the pots. I was able to set the DC Offset and Bias to perfect factory settings. All the lights worked as well.
I fed an mp3 player into the Aux input and hooked up some small memorex bookshelf speakers. My God. I don't recall ever hearing anything with such splendid separation and sweetness. I don't mean to swear, but holy shit. I haven't even hooked it up to good speakers and hi res input. It sounds like someone built a cross between a Phase Linear and a Marantz. I'm gonna have a hard time letting go of this one. My buddies weren't kidding.
I just thought I'd share this with the house. I'll share some pics when I get the cover back on. Right now I'm just enjoying listening to it, I'll get the cover on tomorrow.. LOL
![20250308_221531[1].jpg](/data/attachments/82/82437-bb26710da3a5eb64502e9c1c44edb7ab.jpg)
