I purchased the above Marantz 2230 in October of last year from a friend having a yard sale. I paid $125 for the unit knowing it had some issues, most notably that after it warmed up, it made an awful static sound in both speakers. I assumed it was probably a bad transistor or two. After a few test sessions at home, it went from bad to worse quickly and started blowing fuses upon powering up and not working at all.
Thanks to some research online, mostly on the AudioKarma forums, I came to the conclusion that the unit needed a new bridge rectifier, something I had never replaced before. I ordered the new part and successfully installed.
I thought it would be a fun learning experience to rebuild the unit’s boards and replace all the capacitors and transistors while I had it open. I decided to rebuild both amp boards as well as the preamp and power supply boards. I then reset the voltage and bias back to the recommended settings in the manual.
This process took about four months, although in the middle of that time was an especially busy work project and the holidays that cut my hobby time down drastically. Once I started working on rebuilding the boards, it moved much faster.
Now that I’ve replaced the bridge rectifier and rebuilt the boards, the unit is functioning properly and sounds great. I had a nice long listening session with it yesterday.
After posting on my socials, I had three people ask me to repair their gear. I decided to turn each down politely as I have a backlog of gear at home that I want to work on first. Whenever I take on other people’s repairs, I find myself getting stressed out and not enjoying the learning process of repairing the gear (which is the whole reason I do it in the first place). It felt good to politely say no and suggest they send their gear to a repair shop in town instead. This gives me back time to work on my other projects.
Next up is a Sansui 2000x that is giving me some trouble. I rebuilt the amps boards last year but after a long listening session I noticed some distortion still coming through. Turns out there are two historically noisy tantalum capacitors on the phono board that need replacing as the entire audio signal runs through them before reaching the amp boards. I plan on replacing those next and seeing if that fixes the distortion issue.
It felt great to get this Marantz unit restored. My last two projects weren’t successful repairs and I’d been beating myself up about. Having this one work properly was a big boost in confidence.
Aaron Hartley 