Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Advice from Axiom Owners Can anyone help with receiver diagnosis?

I've been trying to help my significant other digitize some old LP's that haven't been, and probably won't be, released as CD's (early music). Using her 2-channel system, which I'm not too familar with, I was getting bad results.

I noticed that her right speaker was putting out a very weak, distorted sound; after switching the speaker wires at the receiver, that behavior switched to the left speaker. I also noticed that when trying to record from the turntable (of course using the receiver's phono input), the right channel signal was extremely weak. However, when recording a CD or FM broadcast, both channels look good.

Without further testing, it seems to me that the receiver's amplifier and preamplifier sections have a bad right channel since a bad amp channel would explain the lousy speaker output and a bad preamp channel would explain the lousy unamplified (but preamplfied) phono output. My question is whether this conclusion makes sense. Would the amp and preamp sections of a very old receiver share key components and fail together like this? Also, do you think this is sufficient testing to declare the receiver dead? I'm not sure it will be easy to find her an inexpensive replacement (probably all she needs: early music isn't played loud) that still provides phono support. Thanks for any thoughts.

1) Could be a bad phono input. You might want to crack it open and make sure there's no loose internal connections.

2) Could be a bad cable on your turntable. Maybe try another turntable.

It would seem the amplifier is OK due to the problem going away when using the CD. Old equipment can commonly have bad connections at the selector knobs from dirty contacts. A lot of times a litlle contact cleaner in this area and working the knobs will fix it. Also did you eliminate the turntable having the problem. Since the turntable is having a problem with only one output. You could switch the right and left connections and see if the symptom is the same or moves the other side. Just some thoughts.

Sorry, I could have been a bit clearer: the right speaker output is bad no matter what the source: tuner, CD, or phono. That's why I don't think this is just a turntable or receiver phono problem. However, when I send the signal from the receiver out to the recording software on the computer (via the tape record outputs), I can see from the level display that the right channel is bad *only* on when the source is phono; it's fine on tuner or CD.