Thursday, July 31, 2014

Cooling problem with Technics receivers

The Saga continues.
A few days ago I stumbled across the ad in a local paper, advertizing Technics SA EX510 receiver. Got interested, negotiated a low price to even lower, and purchased it for $40. There was no remote control to go along with it.
The first day of testing went ok, and I started to believe that I was out of woods, but second day - overload error.

One thing that I noticed was that the unit's cooling design was terrible.
When I put the palm of my hand next to the cooler, I felt heat radiating from the poor controlled cooling.

Although it was made in 90-ies, there can be no excuse for guys who came up with the idea how to cool central transistors. It really looks like a joke, and here's for you to see it.

Red darts show where it is desirable for a cooling air to flow, and purple darts show where the cooling air flow ends up > at the first fins, an inch away from the cooling fan.
You can see the photo in better resolution if you click on it.



Technics engineers could have profited handsomely by consulting Zalman experts, the real masters of cooling designs. Instead, Technics consumers like us are forced to write blogs about Technics incompetence.

This model rolled out several years before copper and heat pipes made the news in audio components cooling world.
And another thing, be sure to leave plenty empty space below this model (EX 510), since the space below it was meant to be exhaust for the cooling airflow inside. While I am trying to figure out how to effectively re-design this mess, you readers should know that the cooling is probable reason for SA EX300 model too.
I was thrown off that idea initially because I have rarely seen fans rotating on that model, hence thought overheating was not a problem, but seeing what I see in SA EX510 model, I am circling back to that idea.
It seems that they just didn't know how to effectively cool it.
The majority of users use the receiver with the low end speakers, so the overload becomes an issue with users like us only, ones who listen music at full power, justifiably expecting a beng for our buck.

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