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RE: Thanks for all the thoughtful replies

If you start to smell rotten fish, you have electrolytic caps on the way out for sure. If the power supply or regulator boards have out of spec caps, you can have all kinds of strange issues crop up. There are many things which can cause the caps to die such as a voltage rating which is too close to the operating voltage of the circuit. Or "rarely used" is often a warning sign. It's best to turn on the electronics monthly and let them warm up for an hour or so to help keep the caps formed.

I just had a very complex transceiver recapped as it had the rotten fish syndrome and eventually went out of spec on several fronts. The radio was designed in Japan for their nominal 100 volt mains vs. the 120 volts we run here. I knew this and powered it from a variac which definitely helped its life span, but the designers had to use physically small electrolytic caps just to enable populating the Regulator and PA boards and the operational voltage was very close to the voltage rating which caused the issues. Luckily we used modern caps physically smaller than years ago which had higher voltage ratings; so this recap should last quite a while.

Depending on your unit and what they designed into it, it may be very robust or not so robust and how well it was used plays into it. It may be just fine or you may be experiencing some out of spec components. With the age of your amp, it maybe a good plan to have it looked at by a good technician. At the very least that person can check the performance parameters to see if things are operating in spec and if not, then it will fairly easy to isolate what component is causing problems.

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  Kimber Kable  

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