advertisement


Early ‘70s Sony TA-1140/ST-1150

Tony L

Tony L

Administrator
The local auction house came through again:

28970202281_7461354a74_b.jpg


A TA-1140 amp and ST-5150 tuner in really lovely cosmetic condition for a whopping £27.60 including fees! I've not tried them through any speakers yet, but they both power up ok, the tuner seems to find signal strength on AM though not FM (no aerial connected, so no huge surprise) and the amp has about 30mV DC on one side and 15mV on the other, so I suspect it may even work! The offset bobs about a bit, but I think that is normal enough. I'll try hooking some headphones to it first (it has a headphone socket) and if that sounds ok then graduate to speakers (I have no crap speakers around, only really nice valuable vintage ones!). I think I'll pop the lid and blow the dust out and look for issues first. Cosmetically they really are in stunning condition, no scratches or dings at all, just rather grubby. I'm good at cleaning kit so they'll soon be looking really good. Certainly heavy, solid and well made with a real nice feel to the knobs etc. I don't know much about this range other than it was very expensive in it's day so no idea what to expect sound-wise. Got to be worth 27 quid though!
 
Watch the paint on Sony tuner dial glasses if you clean - some has become very fragile by now - definitely a dab not wipe moment. Love the built on my 5950.
 
Tony L said:
The local auction house came through again:

28970202281_7461354a74_b.jpg


A TA-1140 amp and ST-5150 tuner in really lovely cosmetic condition for a whopping £27 including fees! I've not tried them through any speakers yet, but they both power up ok, the tuner seems to find signal strength on AM though not FM (no aerial connected, so no huge surprise) and the amp has about 30mV DC on one side and 15mV on the other, so I suspect it may even work! The offset bobs about a bit, but I think that is normal enough. I'll try hooking some headphones to it first (it has a headphone socket) and if that sounds ok then graduate to speakers (I have no crap speakers around, only really nice valuable vintage ones!). I think I'll pop the lid and blow the dust out and look for issues first. Cosmetically they really are in stunning condition, no scratches or dings at all, just rather grubby. I'm good at cleaning kit so they'll soon be looking really good. Certainly heavy, solid and well made with a real nice feel to the knobs etc. I don't know much about this range other than it was very expensive in it's day so no idea what to expect sound-wise. Got to be worth 27 quid though!
Click to expand...

Looks nice Tony. I took a £20 punt on a Sony TA-1150 on eBay a few years back. Once I blew out the 1/2-inch layer of dust (not joking, it was like someone had emptied their Dyson into it!) it worked nicely. These units are really well built. I could never get used to the slider volume control though so I moved it on a few months later for a small profit. Wish I'd have held onto it a bit longer as it would likely be worth a bit more now, alas…

My best score was a Sony STR-6800SD Receiver for the princely sum of a tenner! It was advertised as untested and for spares/repair but worked fine after a couple of squirts of DeOxit. In the dark, the soft green glow of the tuner dial was very menacing :cool:. Really great sounding unit, richly immersive and meaty, but lacking the neutrality of my Yamahas of the same era.

98090-sony_str6800_sd__one_of_the_best_sony_receivers_ever.jpg
 
Just opened the amp up:

28941948342_babbd42794_b.jpg


Just filthy! 40+ years of dust!

28941949582_d2aba0baf2_b.jpg


A few minutes gentle work with a soft paint brush later and it is looking a lot cleaner.

I'm really taken with the build quality, this is very nicely put together with proper tied cable looms etc. Far neater than the spaghetti wiring one often sees in Japanese amps. I can see no evidence of it ever being serviced nor of any bulging or leaking caps etc. Looks very good indeed. So good I've now tried it on headphones and it seems to work perfectly (sounds very good indeed). The volume slider has the odd crackle here and there, but it is way better than I feared and I suspect a little switch cleaner will sort it perfectly (I guess being vertical it doesn't catch anything like the crap a mixer fader does) and all controls seem to work. It looks like a good 'un. I'll leave it to cook for a bit once I've bolted it together again and maybe have the guts too hook it to some speakers later. Thinking about it I have a pair of somewhat wonky but functional B110s somewhere so I may hook them up first rather than my lovely Tannoys.
 
Mystery component time:

28761648100_a0f34bb795_b.jpg


Anyone care to tell me what on earth the glass thing next to the two white rectangular 5W 0.5 KOhm resistors is? Looks, dare I say it, like a valve! There's one on the other side too, so I assume one of them per channel.
 
Looks like a neon, could be some form of protection as it will strike and conduct.

Pete
 
Thanks folks. I've found a service manual over on HiFi Engine here which is very useful. I'll check the bias at some point to see if it is still in range, though I'm not hearing a lot wrong with this combo at present - I'm currently listening to Radio 3 via some suitably retro Sennheiser HD-414s and it sounds very good indeed!
 
Just had a look in my 1973 HiFi Year Book (I have quite a few, but not a complete set) and the Sony TA-1140 cost £109, which was a lot! For comparison a Quad 33 was £48, a 303 £58 and a woodcase Sugden A21 £65. The tuner isn't in my book. This was clearly decent kit in its day. I'll go hunting in my Gramophone mags and see if I can find a review.
 
Just checked the amp's bias and it was well out of spec on both channels. Meant to be 50mV, was in the 80-90mV range. Now corrected. I'm just leaving it to cook for a bit before bolting the lid back on in case it needs another tweak (very sensitive pots). Hopefully this will address the DC offset a bit which was rather high on the left channel which crept up to 45mV after it had been on for a while, right channel about 18mV, which is pretty decent as I understand it. Unusually it had no specific adjustment for this, only bias. The service manual claims the circuit design makes DC balance unnecessary, but I'm at the very limit if my ability just following the instructions, I still can't read circuits etc.
 
Tony, don't suppose you could check the book to see what the STR-6800SD retailed for between 1976-78?
 
ToTo Man said:
Tony, don't suppose you could check the book to see what the STR-6800SD retailed for between 1976-78?
Click to expand...

Whilst it is listed in both the 1978 and 79 editions annoyingly it is with 'no recommended retail price'. A lot of Japanese companies did this around this period, I assume due to box-shifter discounts etc. IIRC the 6800 was a nice hefty piece of kit so I can't imagine it being at all cheap.
 
I spent late last night watching the Olympics and stripping the two Sonys down to clean them. I'm amazed how well the've come up and how good the underlying condition is:

28441648104_3d03159750_b.jpg


They were very grubby, but that always comes off easy enough. The tuner was the scary bit as Sony use a glass front (easy to clean) and behind that another separate glass scale with the text printed on the rear. I've had a run-in with this before and a rather nice later Sony tuner is the only piece of kit I've ever damaged by cleaning with my usual 'magic in a can' Servisol Foam Cleanser 30. It took some of the text off. Anyway, lessons learnt, this time I was really, really careful but needed to do it as it was grubby and the beautiful side-lighting just caught and highlighted the grime. I disassembled it to get both the front glass and glass scale out and set about the latter very gently and slowly with a brand new microfibre cloth and just gently breathing on it. I took ages and thankfully got it done perfectly with no damage at all. Once back together it really is beautiful, the daytime photo above does no justice to how it illuminates, at night it really pops.

To be honest they could both now pass as NOS, there is not a mark anywhere to be seen no matter how close you look aside from a couple of really light hairlines on the grey painted side of the amp, but you have to look for them. Whoever owned these took amazing care of them.

The tuner really is a lovely piece of kit that I now intend to find a slot for in one of my systems somewhere. Probably the Leak/JR149 rig upstairs as it should be easier to find a half decent R3 signal up there. The amp doesn't really have a context at present, but will make a nice ornament/spare.
 
This site contains affiliate links for which pink fish media may be compensated.
Tony L said:
Just had a look in my 1973 HiFi Year Book (I have quite a few, but not a complete set) and the Sony TA-1140 cost £109, which was a lot! For comparison a Quad 33 was £48, a 303 £58 and a woodcase Sugden A21 £65. The tuner isn't in my book. This was clearly decent kit in its day. I'll go hunting in my Gramophone mags and see if I can find a review.
Click to expand...

I think the UK had high levies/duties/tarrifs (what have you) on Japanese HiFi back then, artificially inflating costs in the UK.

Not sure where you can verify this, though. #8 o

PS - they've come up beautifully, Tony! Nice score, and nice work! A good way to spend time convalescing and enjoying the Oly's.
 
It wouldn't surprise me at all, certainly Japanese kit in the early '70s was very expensive indeed on RRP. Sure, it is well made and has travelled a long way, but I suspect it is more than that. The TA-1140 looks like a very nice piece of kit; hefty, well made and with a beautiful solid feel to the controls (e.g. the tone controls have step detents etc), but at the end of the day it is just a 35 Watt integrated. It shouldn't have been more expensive than a Quad 33/303, which really was 'The Amp' in its day! I can't imagine many folk in the UK buying them unless there was very considerable discounting going on, which I suspect there was (you could never haggle much off Quads, Sugdens etc as I recall, but the imported stuff was a free-for-all).

I've just stuck the tuner in the Leak Stereo 20/JR149 system upstairs with one of those cheap translucent white plastic & copper FM aerials and it really is working beautifully. I have full signal strength and stereo on Radio 3 & Radio 4, and the other stuff I'd never listen to seems to be there too. R3 & 4 are coming in with no hiss I can hear and sound great! This is a very nice tuner. Seems well liked out there in tuner-geek land too, a well respected four-gang job. I guess it could probably do with recapping etc, but I'm reluctant to touch it as it seems happy enough.
 
At risk of straying off-topic, I'd love to know what the UK retail prices were for some of the more lavish 70s Japanese TOTL models, e.g.:

Pioneer SX-1250 / SX-1980,
Pioneer SA-9500 / SA-9800,
Rotel RX-1603,
Sansui G9000 / G22000 / G30000,
Yamaha CR-1000 / CR-2020 / CR-3020,
(to name but a few).

I'm sure these would require a small mortgage to buy if they were being made today!

Perhaps we should start a price list thread for this, it would certainly make interesting reading...
 
Some manufacturers back in the early 70's had absurd recommended prices which were then always heavily discounted; Pioneer was a prime candidate for this. I can't tell you the price of the equipment above but I can tell you I bought a brand new Pioneer SA500A, Garrard SP25, Wharfedale Denton set up for £100 in 1971/2. The Pioneer was great little amp and outclassed the rest of the kit.
 
A few 1978 examples:

Yamaha CR1000 £488
Sansui 9090 £633
Rotel RX-1603 £525
Sony & Pioneer not listing prices.

I hate to think what the two really huge Pioneer receivers would have cost, those things really were statements.

PS Again for a stable benchmark a Quad 33/303 was £90/£98. Interesting to note it had almost doubled in price since 1973.
 
Ha! Spot the design flaw!

29072949875_0df504ff63_b.jpg


It looks absolutely beautiful in the dark, but where the heck is the tuning scale pointer?! (hint: it's somewhere around 92mHz). I'm pretty sure that there isn't a bulb on the pointer itself that could have failed, but I may pop the lid to check at some point. No big deal, just made me laugh! Sounded lovely on Radio 3 earlier, which is where it will always be tuned, so who needs a pointer?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.


advertisement


Back
Top