AUDIO RESEARCH SP-10 MODIFICATIONS


I'm looking for a old school Audio Research Repair Person ???    I have a very fine Audio Research SP-10 two piece pre-amp that Steve Huntley has pretty much messed up and need someone with Special Audio Research experence to put it back to its original fine design, instead of some dream of betterment......It would need to be that special technition .......Please if you don't have special or direct information about these SP-10's don't respond.............THANKS

autospec

I think I'll give it a couple days and if I can't get something going on it I will just sell it to someone who has the time and money to repair it.............It does work, just not real good and a couple people ask to buy it...........Will

Try Audio Classics- they do sell used ARC and I know they had a lot of work to do on that Marantz 7, which had been bastardized. They won't be cheap. Bill Thalmann, who did a fair amount of pieces for me, passed, sadly. Good luck, the SP-10 has a well deserved place in the history of tube preamps, though a tad microphonic. 

whart:   The problem is Audio Research does not have the time to work on something that Steve Huntley messed up, and I am qualified to work on it but I don't have the time either ..........I build tube amplifiers and I have about 10 orders now, so I don't have time............Will

Does the manufacturer still service these? I had an SP-10mkii that went back and forth to ARC when WZJ was still around. We tried gel tube sockets to minimize microphony- didn't work; and the factory hot rodded it per something that HP discussed- I can't remember what was bypassed in the hot-rodded version. To me, this model was the height of the original tube preamp era for ARC. There have got to be schematics for the unit, no? And some restoration shops could follow those. I think Audio Classics (or whatever that used McI shop is called) restored a Marantz 7 for somebody on SH forums who bought a unit which suffered a gutted  phono stage that had been replaced with solid state circuitry; the shop restored the unit to original design. 

BDP24:   Very well put, Most people don't understand the intermingling of components,les they be good or bad , expensive or cheap..........I need a old school Audio Research technician like Chris from the old days, but Chris is gone to.............   

 

@autospec: Good point about after-market mods done by those who don't fully understand the stock design, and the reasons the designer did what he did. Roger Modjeski of Music Reference regularly received in for repair amplifiers of his which had been butchered by someone replacing perfectly fine parts with inappropriate ones. Inappropriate in terms of those parts not performing in the manner the circuit in which they were installed required.