ARCAM ALPHA ONE

[irishiranian]

Hello one and all,

I have just got my hands on one of these to have a play and I wondered if anyone had any suggestions? I'm quite impressed with it considering it's age, especially with the size of the soundstage. There's quite a long thread here about the alpha but does anyone know if the same mods apply to the alpha one?

My frst problem is with the drive which will read cds if I give the disc a little spin myself, to get it started. If not it struggles, gives up and says no disc. Once it's going there are no probs with the sound.

I was thinking about doing the caps and maybe psu. Does anyone have any suggestions of where I can get a new PSU and what rating it should be? I don't really want to do an off board TBH.

I'll put it through my DACMAGIC eventually so I imagine it's not worth replacing the DAC, is that right?

I was going to leave the opaps to begin with to see if I could work with the character of the current ones, however I'm always open to interesting suggestions!

Finaly if anyone had the service manual I'd be very grateful if you would share it with me.

Many thanks for reading.

[SoNic_real_one]

Is that based on SAA7220/TDA1541?

[irishiranian]

I'm not sure to be honest. After opening it up I can see 2 opamps which both have similar markings on. One is 2114D JRC 4012B (this is the Z101 opamp on the board) and the other says2114D JRC 4018B (this is the Z1 position). I've done a quick search and it seems they are used in some Marantz machine.

Any hints n tips welcome!

[SoNic_real_one]

Those are NJM2114 Opamps made by New JRC (rest of the numbers are the manufacturing date). They are very decent OpAmps, there are just a few that fare better than them - in that capsule format. You can look to LM4562 for one.