Reverse engineering Krell KMA 160

Do I need a donor or do I have one

Well thats the rub, I do not need large quanties to make the occasional repair. I do need compliments and I want to keep the cost down or its not cost effective to even repair the unit. So far, I have found nothing in a search of Mouser, Digi-key and Newark. Shoulld the Hafler be the donor for the Krell or vice versa..... ha ha
I could sacrafice a Threshold T2 gain board for some K170s and J74s BUT as soon as I do that I will have a busted T2 that needs them.
I read an earlier thread that implied it is not quite as simple a a single resistor.
 
What a lousy first post....

But.....one of my monoblocks fried something this morning...are there any locals who know how to repair these amps?

I have owned them since the late 80's, and sent them to Krell once for an overhaul..very expensive. Tough times and just cant afford to send them back to krell...rather put some money to those who help others.

There are so many folks here with considerable knowledge ... can anyone offer direction?


Best,

Marc
 
Thanks for responding!

No...went to turn them on and a flash occured. opened up the units to peek inside to see what fried, and saw a metal disc cap connected to pwoer and the switch burnt. I assume this is a protection device of some sort..a fuse.

Thoughts?

Marc
 
I'm curious to find out what could have blown the inlets on two monoblocks at once. The simultaneous failure seems to rule out a transformer short.

Edit: Oh nevermind, I see that it's just one. Transformer short seems pretty likely then.
 
KMA160

This unit lets the smoke out at the rear driver sections. I have replaced a 15024 and the emitter. It smoked the transistor and resistor right away at power up. Can this be powered up on a variac and bypass the relays? All the info in this post is great, but the links of dwg. and pics of many projects do not seem to be available. I am looking on wiki for the 160 info and have not succeeded yet. Any ideas?
 
Huh, I just noticed that all my drawings disappeared from this thread. I will put them back up later today.

One thing you can do is disconnects all the outputs and the driver assemblies, and check the operation of the input board alone.
 
Here are the missing photos:

Burned out original input board.
An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.


Partly disassembled KMA-160:
An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.


Close-up of power supply and protection board:
An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.


Close-up of output board:
An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.


Another detail of output:
An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.


Repaired input board, and my redesigns:
An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.