As you may recall, I went through something of an adventure configuring a new flat screen television with sound (see also here). The saga continued even after the ultimate repair of the receiver and it’s been more or less happily hooked up and functioning somewhat brilliantly for a while now. The only problem has been that I have the audio of the cable box hooked directly to the receiver, but the sound doesn’t quite synch up with the TV audio: that is, there is a short delay between the two on most channels, such that you get a weird echo-type sound. I get around that by turning the TV sound off, but that means the receiver is the only sound device and it has no remote control, so to adjust the volume. . . .yeah, get up and go to the receiver and do it manually.
I couldn’t hook the TV’s “audio out” directly to the receiver because the TV is optical and the receiver isn’t. Hence, I ended up having to buy an optical-analog converter and then an optical cable to go from the TV to the converter. Haven’t tried it yet, so I hope hope hope it actually works and I can use the TV’s volume control on the receiver.
Why do I bring this up? Well, I initially wanted to get a vintage receiver for it because, A) I like it and it looks tres cool, and B) Hey, it’d be cheap, right? $25 for a receiver and I’m in business! No need to drop almost $200 on a new receiver!
Ha.
Tallying up the cost of the receiver ($25) plus the cost of the new part ($20) plus the cost of the professional repair guy to fix what I couldn’t ($80) plus the converter box ($20) plus the optical cable ($20) plus all the assorted doo-dads to try my hand at soldering ($??) I really didn’t come out very far ahead if any, money-wise and it also took a lot of time and headaches.
OTOH. . . . .looking at the photos in that first link, I still love the way that Yamaha looks. Just gorgeous. And I like having a great vintage receiver that I always kind of lusted after when I was a teenager, still working beautifully all these years later (and sounding great). So I dunno what the object lesson in all this is, save for being careful when “going vintage”.
Of course, I have my eye on a Kenwood KR9600 receiver at a local estate sale this weekend, too. . . . . .
