Hitachi Amp Restored

My Hitachi HA 610 amplifier began giving trouble about 4 months ago.  Stephen did what he could but could not fix the problem.  I reluctantly agreed to scrap the unit because it did not seem worth fixing.  However, one night Stephen got it going well enough to put some music through his speakers and Brenda, who is not exactly an audiophile, was amazed at the quality of the sound.  This was from an ailing amplifier that was more than 35 years old.

Stephen mentioned a nearby business, PN Electronics, that specialized in repairing all sorts of sound systems.  Stephen gave Peter at PN a call and learned that I would have to lay down $130 for the assessment of the unit and quotation in the event that it was repairable.  After thinking about it for a few days I decided to indulge myself and try to have the amplifier fixed. 

About 3 weeks later I got a call from Peter.  He told me that the amp had all sorts of problems associated with age (Yep, I can relate to that!).  There were many components such as capacitors and resistors that had to be replaced and there were broken connections (ie dry joints) everywhere.  He quoted another $400+ to do the work, on top of the money that I had paid for the evaluation.  I told him that I knew that he could give no guarantees of the future, but what would be the prospects when I got the amp back.  He replied that it would get back to me as new and give me years of service because "That's what I do."

Ten days later the amp was ready.  Stephen picked it up and had a 15 minute chat with Peter, who said that he had put in a lot of hours soldering and replacing components and to Stephen looked proud and satisfied with his work.  Stephen told me that Peter's face dropped when he told him that we had almost scrapped the amplifier. 

Peter is a very rare breed of specialist these days in that he gets down to the component level of these older electronic boards.  He enjoys his work and gets a big buzz out of bringing these units back to life.

The all up cost of the refurbishment was $572.  That's worth it to me.  The sound it puts out is in a class above that put out by my state-of-the-art Onkyo.  Stephen figures that a modern amp that could put out that quality of sound would cost thousands of dollars.

I plan to retire the rock solid Sony 5.1 amplifier that I've been using to deliver sound to the dining room speakers (via the Onkyo, which passes the sound from the Sony carousel disc player to the Sony) and will replace it with the Hitachi amplifier running stand-alone to produce sound from analogue devices such as the Sony disc player, an AM/FM tuner, an Acoustic Research turntable, and even an Akai reel-to-reel tape deck that was working fine the last time that I used it (about 20 years ago.)