You can get a volt meter for $3-$10 at any harbor freight, or crappy tire if you live in canada. Not a really good one, but plenty accurate down to at least 10ths of volts.
The thing about DC offset in audio is that, without knowing the schematic, it can come from anywhere or be blocked anywhere.
If your cd player outputs a DC offset but your preamp has a capacitor-coupled input, the preamp blocks the offset.
Your Tandberg is an excellent piece of vingage gear. But it's old, and sometimes bad things happen to good gear.
It's important to check the DC offset in the speaker and headphone outputs of any non-new gear you acquire.
Admittedly, it's a little tricker with headphone jacks. You'll need to go down to the shack and get a 1/4" plug and some resistors. Lets say 220ohm resistors.
Connect one resistor from the ground lug of the headphone plug to each signal lug. You can just twist the wires if you don't have a soldering iron
Leave everything hooked up, turn it all on, but don't play any music. Plug your dummy load into the jack and read the voltage between the ground lug and the two signal lugs.
Reading 20mv or less is no big deal. if you read whole volts, you have a Big Problem and need to fix your amp. This may mean replacing a failed component, or merely adjusting a trimpot somewhere. Helps to have a schematic.
Technically you don't *need the resistors, but if the amp has a capacitor output but lacks draining resistors on the caps, if you hook up a volt meter when there is no load, the volt meter will actually charge the capacitor and you will read a DC offset that just climbs and climbs the longer you hold the leads on.
No sound at all. Did I do something wrong? Is there something I can do to repair them. Any help would be appreciated.
