Better than no technician at all, but sometimes not by much...

There they sat on top of a cabinet for over a year, left as a project for the hot season when I'm stuck inside.

• Sansui AU-D9 integrated amplifier
  
  
• Pioneer TX-9500 II stereo tuner
  
  
• Technics SL-QL1 direct drive turntable

The task? Switch them all from their U.S. 120V voltage settings to Thailand 240V settings.

Sansui AU-D9 Integrated Amplifier

山水電気株式会社 / Sansui Electric Company

Maybe they lost money on almost every piece of equipment they made through the mid-1980s, but so be it. All the people who worked there can be proud of the excellent equipment they produced.

Great design by Sansui, as evidenced by the excellent voltage selector, which was readily understood by the technician seeing it for the first time.

Pioneer TX-9500 II Stereo Tuner

パイオニア株式会社 / Pioneer Corporation

If you observe a machine for 65 years, you learn a bit about its inner workings. So it is with my brain, which is not a bad brain. I have never desired to exchange it for a different brain. 

And yet, I have a significant brain defect, a serious failure in thinking approach. I'll describe it as hyper fixation on a particular idea/theory. Or as a kind of limitation/failure to adequately consider all possibilities. I sometimes stay with an ultimately wrong idea/theory for way too long. I do this even though I've caught myself doing this throughout my life, even though I've conducted post-mortem analyses of several serious scenarios wherein this defective thinking has occurred.

So it was with the voltage selector change project for this Pioneer TX-9500 II tuner. I will spare you the technical details. There was nothing pretty about the bull-headedness of wrong ideas and errors along the way. And there is nothing pretty about what remains of the voltage selector switch. 

The only good thing, and perhaps the only reason why you might still want me as the radioman on your ship, is that the input voltage selector was successfully changed to the 240V setting.

Technics SL-QL1 Direct Drive Turntable

パナソニック / Panasonic Corporation

The Technics SL-QL1 is not what you think of when you think of a turntable. The tone arm is attached to the lid, and it moves across the record as it plays. I think I remember it not skipping in some instances where standard-type record players skipped. But the only way to know for sure is to test, which I may have to do given that my digital files have all been lost due to my backup failure. The only way for me to listen to my remaining 30 or 40 albums is to play them on the turntable. Maybe that was meant to be...

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