Eulogy for an amplifier

 

The Yamaha began life in 2001.  All 6 speakers once adorned the apartment like a kind of low cost recording studio.  It's subwoofer, Dolby pro logic & reverb effects made the dullest soundtracks sound amazing.  The high end was a bit flat, but overall, it was better than anything lions had before.

All this was just $400 in those days.   The equivalent model today is $480.

The confuser didn't have a way of outputting 6 channels besides a semi pro sound card with 6 RCA connectors.  Helas, it was such a hassle to configure all 6 channels to watch a movie, the lion kingdom only watched Gladiator with the 6 channels as encoded, then watched everything else with 2 channels.  Everything else relied on Dolby pro logic to convert 2 channels to 6 channels, which was impressive enough.

The center speaker soon stopped working. It was down to just the manes & the subwoofer until around 2010.  Lack of space & complaining neighbors put an end to the subwoofer after that.

In 2012, after years of growing electrical noise, the Yamaha was opened up for the 1st time & cleaned.  The molex connectors & dust were the prime suspects.  This subjectively reduced the interference, though it was more likely just whacking the components that did it.

In 2014, the volume control broke.  A tiny shaft connecting it to the 6 channel potentiometer broke.  A new volume control for just the 2 mane channels was fashioned.  That lasted 2 years.

In 2016, the Yamaha was finally put in storage & replaced with the lion kingdom's 1st home made amplifier.  Lions dreamed of making a home made amplifier since they were 7, but when it finally happened, it was a germane combination of parts from the Yamaha & random IC's.  It was hardly anything that looked like a stereo component in childhood but it worked.

In 2020, the last of the HTR-5230 was finally recycled to make room for a notional 3D printer. There are a lot of transistors in a 6 channel amplifier. Some parts won't be moving on, like the vacuum fluorescent display, the transformer, or the relays.  Other parts were previously recycled into the home made amplifier.

After some testing, the HTR-5230's relays were junk, not even worth the risk of using after a cleaning, if they ever were used again. They were why the Yamaha had so much interference. 10 years of daily use carbonized those contacts but good. When lion kingdom tried to solve the interference by cleaning the molex connectors in 2012, it never thought of the relays. After the volume control broke in 2014, it was a dead amplifier walking.

Lions would never use relays. They would use a triac.

The Yamaha was the last of the commercially made amplifiers.  Future amplifiers would all be home made with a much better high end.