BeoCenter 9000 troubleshooting

[brianlaing]

Hello all!

I had gotten a “repair” BeoCenter 9000 on ebay a few months ago. I’ve been able to fix the following:

1. Doors open/close – ordered new belts and replaced. Lubricated the channels where the doors slide. Both are working silently and smoothly. Fortunately no re-stringing required.
2. Top and bottom glass – removed all old adhesive. Touched up the where the adhesive removal process had lifted the black paint. New adhesive tape. Remounted. Works great.
3. Frozen supply and take-up reels on the cassette recorder. Removed the very tiny washers and pulled the reels off. Lubricated and replaced the reels. Replaced the belt. Works great. Reverse works.
4. Replaced the “problem” capacitor on the CD drive and the CD plays now. Fortunately, this BeoCenter has an intact center plastic hub and spring to hold the CD down.

There are 2 remaining issues I have with the machine (besides there being no replacement feet – which are missing).

1. Very low audio: If I turn the BeoCenter all the way up, I get sound. At normal listening levels, I get nothing. I can hear a cassette and CD playing fine through speakers and headphones, but way too low. The fuses are all okay. The lights all work as expected as does the remote. Switching between outputs works fine.
   Any suggestions where to look or what to do next?
2. AM / FM radio: No audio. When turned all the way up (see issue 1 above LOL), I can hear hiss. With an FM T-antenna attached, it never finds a station. When I enter a station that I know works (88.5, for example) I get nothing. My Beomaster 2000 tunes in 88.5 just fine with the same antenna. Any thoughts?

Thanks for your help!

[Mark-sf]

I would continue to check for the proper power supply voltages to the different modules. Even though all the fuses are fine, a unit this old can have failed or failing electrolytic capacitors. I believe the tuner section has at least one rail dedicated to it (12v) and you also will need +-33 to the chip power amps.

[Guy]

brianlaing wrote:

Very low audio: If I turn the BeoCenter all the way up, I get sound. At normal listening levels, I get nothing. I can hear a cassette and CD playing fine through speakers and headphones, but way too low. The fuses are all okay. The lights all work as expected as does the remote. Switching between outputs works fine. Any suggestions where to look or what to do next?

This could possibly be a mute relay problem – maybe search the archived forum for ‘mute relay’ and look at the results for both BC9500 and 9000. One quick way to check is to plug the speakers into the speaker 2 sockets as these are not wired though the relay. If this works, the relay is probably the problem, and is quite easy to replace.

[brianlaing]

Hello Guy!

I actually replaced the mute relay (and forgot to mention it) with a new one. It wasn’t working properly when I first got the BeoCenter. The volume is low on both the sets of speaker sockets BUT when I select Mute with the speakers connected to the first set of speaker sockets, the volume (low as it is) does mute properly.

[brianlaing]

Thanks Mark-sf!

I’ll do some digging online how to check the power supply voltages. I don’t have any experience with doing that and only have a multi-meter.

[brianlaing]

As a follow up, someone had mentioned that maybe a lot of the issues were due to maybe an overload due to an electrical surge. I suspect they were correct!

I ended up buying a new (well, from a donor machine) amplifier board and a new (donor) FM board.  After replacing those two boards everything works.  Hurray!

And after a year, still working great  I got a Audio Terminal remote and it works as well  old technology made new 🙂

This experiment get me the courage to rebuild a Beomaster 2400.  The BeoCenter project was a piece of cake compared to the 2400 ?

 

 

 

[Author]

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