Reviving a broken Pioneer amplifier as a CD jukebox

Hackaday features a nice repair-and-rebuild story. A builder known as Boz was given a broken Pioneer surround-sound receiver. It sat on a shelf for a few years until he had the idea of building a jukebox for his ripped CDs and bringing the receiver back to life with a new main board.

Modern home entertainment amplifiers are full of digital functions, and when those fail they are often proprietary and hard to fix. This one turned out to be surprisingly modular, though. The front panel with its VFD display and driver still worked, and so did the class AB amplifier and its power supply. With the service manual in hand, reverse engineering was straightforward, so he removed the main board and replaced it.

He reused the original connectors and a few other parts and designed a PCB that carries a Raspberry Pi Pico and a DAC. With MMBASIC firmware the result looks as if it had been made this way from the beginning, and the look of the board inside, apart from a couple of bodges, adds to that.

Hackaday notes that this one is special in terms of quality and that revival projects like this are usually seen with gaming hardware.

I like that the working analog power stage was kept and only the dead digital part was replaced. It is a practical idea for anyone who has an old receiver in a closet with good amplifier parts and a broken brain.

Source: Hackaday