Getting Beosystem 5500 components working

63 replies

I have been collecting various Beosystem 5000 and 5500 components over the last few years when they would show up for sale with low values. One of my goals this year was to spend some time and get a working 5500 system so I thought now would be a good time.

So far I have a Beomaster 5500 recapped and working well. I also have a CD5500 that only required a belt change and a Beogram 5000 that I had to change out the transformer and fix the usual deck lid latch.
The Beocord 5500 is on my bench now but it looks like it will need a part or a repair of a part.

Here is the restored system so far. It looks nice on my SC60 cabinet and with a pair of RL140 speakers.

UPDATED...


 

I worked on the Beomaster 5500 first. This is what it looked like first opened up.  It was in good shape and worked moderately well but it didn't seem like it sounded as good as I expected it to so I decided to do recap it.

The tuner board tilts up nicely for access so I recapped that one first.

There wasn't anything eventful on this recap.  It was just a straightforward desoldering of old parts and soldering in of new parts.  The tricky parts were figuring out how to dismantle the Beomaster.  To do the rest of the boards I removed them all from the chassis.

Removing the boards also allowed me to clean any dust out of the Beomaster chassis.
I didn't remove the Beomaster display board at the very front. It is working fine so I didn't mess with it.  I also didn't replace to two big 10,000uF power  supply capacitors. I measured them though and they measured just over 11,000uF.  On the microcomputer board I replaced two electrolytic capacitors and put in a new Lithium battery.  For the audio input board and preamp I used Nichicon Muse Bipolar capacitors for all of the replacements in the signal path. Here are the removed boards after the recap.

After the reinstall of the boards I powered up the BM5500 and checked the cold start idle current. It was a little difficult to get the left and right channels adjusted to 11mV (across the output resistors) per the service manual.  I decided that I had better replace the two (L & R) 100 ohm trim pots with some new ones. Unfortunately I didn't take any pictures of that part of the process but I was able to easily set the left and right idle to 11mV after the trimmer replacements.  Here is a picture of the recapped Beomaster ready to be closed up.

The CD 5500 was a simple repair.  Its CD tray was acting flaky so it needed a new belt. I had ordered replacement belts from Martin a while back so they were waiting to be used.
Here is the CD 5500 opened up.

This picture shows the plastic tab to press to release the big pulley with the tray belt.
Once that belt was changed the CD 5500 worked great.

The next system component was the Beogram 5000.  I have thought about getting a Beogram 5500 several times but I have plenty of tangential B&O turntables and I liked the looks of this Beogram 5000.  I have two of these turntables. One has some broken internals and I got it cheap for parts. The other one was supposed to be a working turntable but was set for European line voltage (240 V).  So I needed to rework the power supply wiring to get it to work on my 125V line voltage.  The easiest way to do this was to take the transformer out of my parts unit and put it in the good turntable.
Here is a picture showing the transformer wiring differences between the 240V and 120V models.

Here is the 120V transformer installed in my good Beogram 5000 turntable.

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