FreedomJazzDance, why must you torture me so? Not your fault I am such an audio gear nerd. Apart from my designer/manufacturer ‘issue’ I have an admiration for golden age Japanese summit level hi-fi gear. An itch that remains unscratched due to time and budget limits.
I watch to see if your request surfaces any current users of ESPRIT components.
For those of you reading this who were not in the hobby (or born) in the early ‘80s the Sony ESPRIT series FreedomJazzDance references represent one of those instances when a major Nippon electronics corporation gave their designers free reign and essentially unlimited budgets to advance the state of the art. And the resulting line of halo products that are intended to boost the company’s reputation. Once the domestic, European, and USA markets had accepted as many of these very high end components as they would Sony cashed in on the street cred and used the Sony ESPRIT name shortened to ES on years of mid-fi+ components. Highlights within Sony ESPRIT’s glory days include dual mono preamps so uncompromising you plug the interconnects from the top directly into the PCB, the first V-FET power amps, and among the first class-D amps also using V-FETs just to show they could (see
http://www.firstwatt.com/pdf/art_sony_vfet_40yr.pdf).
The model numbers FreedomJazzDance quotes are from that cost no object era and in my book qualify as highly desirable. In my if-I-were-a-billionaire-audiophile fantasy the climate controlled storage rooms off the audio bunker would include cherry examples of TA-N86B, TA-E86B, and TA-D88B along with APM-8 square driver speakers and PS-X9 turntable. My Japanese operatives would also be on the hunt for the Sony SS-R10 electrostatic speakers, once located and restored we’ll fetch them from Japan with the Gulfstream G650ER.
Back in the real world where resources are finite my fantasy gets rained on. The first issue is the TA-x86B components are 30 to 40 years old. Every single electrolytic capacitor is aged out. Reliability and noise and really hearing what the designers intended demands they be gone through and replaced. Perfect job for a retired electrical engineer or senior technician who can deal with both sourcing correct parts and soldering on decades old circuit boards and is not being intimidated by (but respects) the complexity of the circuits. Paying to have that done I would advise very careful vetting of who will do it and expect to pay $1,000 per unit. Someone will object to that cost (because Internet) and I invite them to consider this view of the Sony TA-E86B interior. I see perhaps 50 caps that need to be changed. Depending on region/country shop labor rates need to be $85 to $120 hour to keep a business open.
Now well and truly down the search engine rabbit hole here is a thread on a German site about restoring a TA-E88 and a circuit board close up from the posts that for me as a circuit designer is pure audio porn.
https://www.analog-forum.de/wbboard/index.php?thread/105352-sony-ta-e88-%C3%BCberholung-eines-klassikers/&pageNo=1
Oh, be still my beating heart. The first thing I see is the other cautionary note, so many custom unobtainable parts. The bright blue plastic cams are part of a selector switch, unlike any I have ever seen. In the first photo above note there are 8 (!!) of these beauties. We also see the shafts and universal joints allowing the switches to be on the PCB located where they are needed in the circuit flow yet connected by long shafts to the front panel knobs. Note (reading upside down) C307 and his mate other side of the shaft small electrolytic caps that age so unpredictably. But then my mind was blown and I saw an example of why these are so revered. Look at R428, what the heck kind of resistor is THAT?!?? And they are all over the board! In that odd rectangular package dipped in brown epoxy my guess is Vishay etched film 25 years before anyone in audio had heard of them or Japanese tantalum resistors. So worth the hours and dollars to keep going if you have the resources and passion. In 2019 the only products I see with this level of quality and circuit density on the PCBs are Boulder and Soulution Audio, and those are stuffed by robot pick-n-place machines. The Sony was built by hand by a master craftsman, or more likely craftswoman. To duplicate this TA-E88 in 2019, it’s a $25,000+ pre-amp.
I will end this post with the story of the last and only time I heard a full Sony ESPRIT system. It’s circa 1983 and CD has just been introduced. Like your local hi-fi shop has one player and 5 disks to play on it. No one you know owns a CD player yet. In Dallas Texas on business I find a shop with the new miracle format the magazines are all raving about and at the risk of missing the flight home drive across town to experience it. The shop has a full ESPRIT system source to speakers. The source is a Sony CDP-101 (the infamous first CD player) gussied up in a full 17” wide ESPRIT case. Demo starts and within a few minutes the guy standing behind my seat wearing a DALLAS OPERA t-shirt turns to his friend and says “that is without a doubt the finest sound I have ever heard”. Based on the WOW factors of an analog world’s first encounters with digital audio, namely pitch stability and freedom from noise, he was right. Issue was I was silently suffering through a demo where at the music’s every crescendo I was involuntarily wincing tensing my shoulders and literally grinding my teeth. Life is full of irony and in 1983 the irony was Sony’s herculean efforts to produce the ESPRIT preamp, amplifiers and speakers yielded a system so transparent and revealing it was making their bet-the-company new format CD sound unlistenable to my ears. So informed I waited for digital to improve spending the next few years upgrading my turntable and buying the MFSL and Japanese pressing LPs the record stores were discounting to get rid of and make shelf space for CDs.
