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.
