Danae's dad has a beautiful Marantz 2325 receiver that he had serviced and refurbished while I was away. He showed it off to me while I was there and it's just gorgeous. It looks and feels like it just came out of the factory. He played a few of his records for me (including one made with a direct-to-disc process that I was not familiar with and enjoyed reading up on), and later on I played through all of Dark Side of the Moon. I never turned the volume knob more than 30 degrees or so: 125 watts per channel is lot of sound!
It has a built-in analog (of course, but how cool is that?) Dolby noise reduction system! That would probably be a lot more useful if people were doing much with tapes anymore or there were Dolby-optimized radio broadcasts. From a purely technical/cultural point of view though, it's fascinating!
Anyway, he had a big zip-lock bag full of lots and lots of old parts that the tech who worked on replaced with new stuff and sent back. He joked about me taking it home if I wanted it, but I jumped at the chance. The servicer had replaced all the incandescent lamps with LEDs, and the old lamps were in there. Rather than buy new ones online for my 2270, I figured I could swap in his old ones if any of them worked. Last night I connected them up to little power supply at 8 volts and found that four of the fuse-style lamps from behind the radio dial and five of the little solder-on lamps from behind specific indicators still worked. Nice! When I have a few hours I'm going to put them in, and replace the yellowed vellum light diffuser behind the signal meters too. Maybe someday I'll buy new lamps or even LEDs since the incandescents are getting hard to find. But having all the lights working in the present for free is great!
There's other interesting stuff in that bag of parts too. It looks like they replaced every cap in there, not just the electrolytics, and some resistors, transistors, and other parts too. It's likely that some of them are still good, and potentially expensive and/or hard to find on my own. Especially the output transistors and the little trim-pot I see in there.
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basefinder; That's a lot of books on thing shell concrete you've picked up lately! How technical are they? Are they readable for someone without much professional background? And what was "101 Things I Learned in Engineering School" like?
