Hi, I started my leave and have some time to burn on hobby projects. I took the top off of my Sansui 317 to take a peek inside. Apart from a reasonable amount of dust, I found some goo around some of the larger caps. Seems to me that at least some need to be replaced.
I am not sure of this but the amp is about 20 years old so if these are all original, replacement sounds reasonable.
I found some different caps in there:
2 physically quite large 50V 10 000µF ELNA caps marked CE69W(p) NC
6 smaller 5 ...
Well Ferdi, I see you are in for some good times.
Whether you should upgrade or not I don't know, that depends on what you want to end up with.
You are quite right in saying I messed around with that particular model, that was quite a few years back. At the time, its owner had its service manual, so looking up the action was easy. I did change all lectrolytic caps, some transistors and in particular, the output stage. I used Motorola's MJ 15022/15023 250W devices, closely matched, instead of the original 100W devices, but I also changed the drivers.
As for the capacitors, the amount of work to change them is such that in my view, it's not really worth it unless you upgrade them. That's what I did, one by one. Overall, I used caps from Fischer&Tausche and Siemens, which you can look up at
http://www.buerklin.de (in German only) and possibly
http://www.conrad.de (in German, but also available in English).
There was improvement, to be sure, but don't hope for a classy, let alone high end amp in the end. The 317 was an economy model, so no matter what you do, in the end you will be limited by the overall platform and design. Taking it a step further and changing at least some of the critical resistors to quality 0.1% metal film ones will improve matters a little more, but about the best you can hope for is a really good commercial quality amp. Never an audiophile one.
Cheers,
DVV
