Adcom GCD-575 Just Died

Any way to desolder one or two of them and hook them up to a LCR meter?

How many look like that? It might only cost a recoverable $10-15 to put new ones in and try it out.

I've taken apart plenty of vintage gear, and that does not look like leakage.

On every one i've taken apart, there has been some kind of glue around the caps. In newer ones it's stuff from a hot glue gun, on all my pre-1990 gear it's been a brownish stuff that looks a lot like the stuff around your caps. Might not be leaking.

Usually, the failure can be traced to the electrolyte breaking down due to aging (i.e. years of use). The chemical structure changes and it begins to ooze or leak out of the metal canister. It's somewhat similar to what's been happening recently with the rash of electrolytic cap failures on computer motherboards. However, in the case of the motherboards, the failures occur rapidly (in a matter of months, in some cases) and the cause is a buildup of hydrogen inside the metal canister due to a chemical imbalance in the electrolyte. A possible end result is that the caps fail catastrophically by exploding and/or catching on fire. Most computer troubleshooting sites recommend to desolder the defective caps and replace them with quality caps.

That's what you'll have to do in your Adcom CD player, as stereth mentioned earlier.

As for the leaked-out electrolyte... if you clean up the board with a bit of anhydrous isopropyl alcohol, then it should be as good as new.

D.

exactly.. sometimes you can see clear wax or something like that around parts, especially computer power supplies.. in the old days the material was like on your pics..

I don't see how that could be leakage given the fact that in your second to last picture the compound is centered around a solid state component.

It's not leakage.

The "goo" you see in the pictures is a glue/mastic designed to stabilize the components to protect from physical (shock) damage during shipping & handling.

I have a similar problem with the audio output on my GCD 575. I still get sound, but it's VERY faint, so I have a fault somewhere in the amplification stages of the CD player. If anyone has experience fixing it I'd love to hear about it.

Yeah, I used to have a 575 and it had the same gunk around the caps... it worked fine (most of the time.)

My humble advice is to check the simple stuff first, like the output rca solder joints and any other signal path wire past the dac.

It's usually the mechanical stuff that busts first... the circuitry on this unit should last a good long while... these were made in the late 80's/early 90's right? That's not all that old.

Hi all, and IMEP,

 

Just joined this forum and thread since I too have an old but venerable GCD575 (1989) and have become interested in the idea of replacing the op amps with something a bit newer. I've ordered a pair of BB OPA627's with this in mind. The brown stuff around some caps inside of mine is similar to yours, so similar in fact that I thought you had mistakenly taken pics of the inside of my amp instead of yours LOL. I was a little concerned, but from scouring the forums, the brown crap appears to be benign glue.

 

I know very little about electronics so replacing the op amps with sockets first ( to enable op amp rolling should I have a mind) will be about the limit of the mischief I would inflict on the player. Improvements to electronic equipment has a touch of a "holy grail quest" about it; one can never know if one has attained maximum sonic benefit and so the search can become never ending. I don't think I would have the resolve or expertise to attempt much beyond very basic join-the-dots type alterations, and besides, speakers are my thing.

 

Still, reading these forums allows me a peak at what can be done. As in all forums of any discipline, there are some really knowledgable folks on this one, and it's a real pleasure to read some of the threads...

 

Cheers, Martin

 

^ You may want to rethink that. The OP275s (from memory) are only used as buffers. The actual I/V opamp per se in this is an Adcom-designed single inline pin affair over on the right side of the board, near the DAC chip. I wound up doing a discrete I/V stage for my brother's 575.