 Hey everybody welcome back today to Retro Tech first off Brutus and I have escaped the bunker Because it's holiday times here at the Retro Tech house. So that means it's Christmas time We celebrate Christmas so the Christmas tree is up right here over my shoulder now We'll tell you I did my best Clark Griswold Cosplay this year and actually went out to a tree farm with my family So I'll show you some pictures of that Now I went out to the tree farm and I was able to pick this tree out of about 200 Chop it down myself and brought it here and got it set up So that was a lot of fun, but that's not what I'm talking about here today Actually, what I'm talking about is in that big armoire right there. So let's switch around and take a look Okay, so there's Brutus just chilling hanging out ready to show off our new digs up in here So this is the armoire and surprise surprise. It's in my main home and of course Yes, there is a large CRT in here I do not have a flat screen up here My family has to sit through television the way it's intended to be on a 4x3 Toshiba shadow mask tube so that is in here This is not the issue the issue is I need some holiday music and I'm gonna set something up down in here And I'll show you what I mean. It's a Retro AV receiver and this one is just stereo audio. It is made by Pioneer We have the TX530 stereo tuner and the stereo amplifier the SA730 So I'm gonna show you now how I got this all cleaned up and ready to hook up in here And then at the end of video, I'll discuss some reasons maybe why you would even consider Adding something like this to your collection and then I'll also talk about how much you can expect one of these things to cost In today's marketplace. So here's a closer look at the Pioneer stereo amplifier from the early 1980s now this Pioneer stereo amp and Tuner were produced in 1982 and they look like they have not been cleaned since then Everything is covered in a layer of dust and soot So one of the first things we're gonna need to do is tear all this equipment down and clean it up thoroughly And after that we'll have an opportunity to get inside and look at some of the hardware and get a review on this combo The first item will tear down will be our Pioneer stereo tuner. This is the TX530 model And again, you'll just see it's a lot of grime and build up Take a closer look at the antenna set up You do have a possibility for having an FM and an AM tuner with a ground loop And these are pretty easy to disassemble you just have two screws in the back And then the shell will slide off and we can get inside After we remove the shell we'll get to see some of the really cool hardware inside the tuner units This always fascinated me with this tuner drum and the whole wheel and how it had a pulley cord on it that You would rotate and it would tension would twist and spin Your tuner into place you could catch the radio station you wanted and here is part of that tuner drum pretty Pretty neat assembly there and we just have some circuit boards inside with our standard electrolytic capacitors and Then at the other end we do have a pretty beefy power transformer with a switch here That is our power switch and then our AC power comes in here and gets grounded and then send it Into that transformer and off into the main board So let me grab my ESD blower and we'll get started cleaning Now this sprayway is specifically one of my favorite cleaners. I don't get any kind of endorsement with this company I just love it because it's ammonia free and has a nice fragrance and I've never had a bad experience using it So we're gonna spray some of that foam on a paper towel use our ESD brush and then scrub in between all the cracks And crevices on our buttons and our knobs and that's a great way to get into those Hard to reach areas get some foam in there let it do its magic And then we'll get a paper towel and wipe it all off and be ready to address the issues with the lid The back shell of the tuner is metal and has been painted black It is dirty and also needs cleaning, but there is this weird pull-up or build-up kind of under the paint I believe maybe there's some kind of chemical reaction going under here Because this is hard as a rock and I cannot get it off Tried scraping obviously with my fingernail, but with stronger things like a screwdriver and scraper It's still not able to get that off I probably could grind it if I wanted to invest additional time into that and then repaint it But that's not really necessary for this setup Now that our tuner is cleaned we can reassemble it and move on to our stereo amplifier Now let's move on to our stereo amplifier the more exciting piece of hardware of the two this one Of course is still dirty, so we're going to disassemble it and clean it But before that let's take a look at some of the audio inputs we have on here We have quite a few options on the back of this Where we can input really any kind of stereo device we want to into these connections Since this is a stereo amplifier you're going to have two speakers But this model actually features two sets of speakers and those speakers can be Added to play in combination, so you can really use four speakers With this amplifier or you could simply use two today for our demonstration will only be using two Last thing to note is this amplifier does have power out For other devices and it does have ratings for those power outlets on the back here Now we're back here in the bunker and I want to go over a few final points with this stereo audio setup and That is first off. Let's look at the cost now if you look at one of these On ebay or something you're going to be looking at a price tag of about a hundred and ten to a hundred and twenty dollars for this item tested and then Ship to you now. I would recommend that you check out your local thrift store These are places that generally have all kinds of this older audio equipment That people tend to get rid of and they don't have any way over other to get rid of it Then to send it over to Goodwill or some other type of local thrift store And in those places tend to sell these items for twenty dollars or less I've gotten a lot of items like this as low as five dollars a piece. So that's my biggest recommendation Don't be too stuck on a certain brand. There's a lot of these Audio devices from the 80s that are very good at what they do the biggest factor should be the condition Is it working? All right, ladies and gentlemen, let's remove our shell and see what we've got packed under this 1982 shell My goodness now, we're just loaded with dust and debris and It's a pretty beefy capacitors here check these two things out. It's a pretty massive one so go over here the transformer This is even bigger Then the tuner transformer an amazingly large heat sink in the center of the circuit board And it's just filled with dirt. Look at this transformer. What is on this some kind of flaky? Crusty mass. Let's See if we can't tell what this is. I have no idea what this is, but it's it's pretty disgusting it flakes off kind of Well kind of resembles like flaky fish food you get for your fish tank pretty awful Let's get the vacuum now. We're gonna get that and the brushes and Start cleaning in this ugly thing. Oh look down here. We've even got a little stowaway that appears It appears to be a little bug down here. Yeah, I'm pretty sure that was his last That was his last moment on this earth I'm gonna use the same exact method to clean the front display area and the button control area of this stereo Amplifier and that's to use the sprayway cleaner This is not just show you what it looks like to begin with and now we'll switch over to how it looks after It's been cleaned and you can see the nice shine off these buttons and our dials are looking very good And now we're pretty much ready to reassemble this thing and run some tests with the hardware All right folks Let's put our shell back together here on our stereo amplifier And then we can go get our tuner stack our Tuner on top of our amplifier, and then we'll have everything ready to set up a demo I'm gonna use the power supply in The to the amplifier for the tuner So I'll just plug that in here and then of course we'll be using a short Audio cable with left and right audio to hook up the tuner into the amplifier There's plenty of other inputs on the back here You've got a couple tape inputs and then you've got this phono input for a record player And there's a grounding off the phono input which was important for some record players So you can hook those kind of older retro audio devices up to this All right before I go move this thing up into my den. I'd like to test it out We're gonna be using some speakers that I got from a yard sale for about eight dollars I believe now this funny thing is is these are actually made by the Tandy Corporation. They're well shielded Very heavy, but they're gonna be perfect for my situation because I need them to be small loud and Not to interfere with my CRT that I have upstairs, which will be just about 18 inches below these speakers Now what about uses for this you can obviously use a stereo hookup and hook that up to anything I think this is a great idea for retro consoles or a specific retro setup If you have something where you use a maybe a VCR a laser disc player Even a DVD player and an older television This would go great for a stereo system to go with that and it'll work Well with really any analog video console and retro gaming console because that's Normally going to be mono and stereo sound which you could easily hook up to this older style machine and Get a lot of good use out of it that way and you could also take advantage of things like the tape player Inputs and the phono inputs in case you find a vintage record player And you want to get into that side of the hobby What do you guys think though? Do you think this is a good idea to invest in one of these items before? They start getting crazy in price What do you think about the performance of a machine like this and what are you specifically using? For a solution in your retro gaming sound setup Please leave me a comment below and let me know because I'm really interested in hearing what you guys out there are using That's gonna do it for today's episode Thanks for joining me and Brutus and we will see you guys next time with some more retro content and have a merry Christmas