Good afternoon. I bought a peavey bandit. The original owner explained that it had an issue where it smoked. I paid next to nothing for it thinking it'd be a good opportunity for me to try out another repair.

So here is what I know. Amp listed as not working and stating that it produced smoke at one point. So first inspection I notice the power cord has had the ground prong removed and one of the prongs remaining is damaged. I opened it up expecting a lot of burnt out parts but from what I can tell there is one cap that is damaged and pretty clearly spewed some liquid out of it.

So my plan of attack here is to replace the power cord and the cap and see if that takes care of the problem. Does anyone else have any suggestions? I'm really excited to get this thing going as I've heard so many good things about these bandits!

I have this little amp which seems to be so well built and sound pretty good. I find the saturation input to be really harsh though and I'm wondering if there's somethings I can do to improve it. It seems to me that the saturation input simply has a transistor boosting the signal into the opamp? Is this correct. I also see three pairs of diodes I the same signal with one set going to ground as hard clippers. Could I take these out or make them switchable? Would changing the diodes to LEDs or germaniums smooth it out?

Thanks in advance!

Good evening everyone. I'm dead a newbie but have some small amount of experience with simple audio circuits. I found this zenith solidstate record player in my wife's grandfathers garage. It's an all in one unit with speakers that hinged out. The phono was not functional so I dug in and started to try to see if the amp was functional and discovered that at least one side of it was. I was able to tap into the circuit and plug my guitar in. Since then I have been reading about RIAA curves and I'm wondering if this has it and if I'll be able to bypass it. So my questions are as follows...

1. Where should I start on the channel that doesn't seem to be working.
2. To bypass the RIAA should I just trace the circuit back to the power amp and then attempt to use a probe to see if audio comes out? Is there a way to protect my sound source in case accidentally probe some place carrying power?


I sincerely appreciate the help. I hope that I am not real far off base. I will try to snap some pics of the circuit for reference some time tomorrow if that is helpful!

Thanks again