My model 300 Receiver repair experiences.

I've had dozens of Advent 300s cross my bench, and seen many types of failures. Let's face it, the model 300 was innovative, but made to be easily affordable. This is 'marketing talk' for inexpensive parts. Here's a few suggestions, based on common sense and many years of repair experience:

• Clean the Switches! Clean the main rotary function selector switch, and all slide switches. Use a good quality contact cleaner. I have used products from Caig Labs for years, and their products are the best. 

• Look for leaky electrolytic capacitors, and replace them. This is, by far, the most common failure in the Advent 300. These caps don't last forever and Advent bought the lowest rated capacitors that would work. I always replace all the electrolytic caps, power supply, coupling etc. The parts will cost you ~ $60.00, and several hours of work. This is well worth the time. Capacitor kits are available on my Repair page.

• Reduced or no output - one channel - most likely due to old, dried out electrolytic capacitor. Feed in a 1 kHz signal, get a scope and see where the signal disappears. These coupling caps can be in the tuner, preamp or main amp. See the tuner schematic or the amplifier schematic.

• Most of the other passive components, resistors, non-electrolytic caps etc, are probably OK. However, I did have one unit where a mylar cap in the bass tone control circuit was bad, and gave excessive bass boost. That was a tough one!

• No output - one channel - If there's no output with any input (phono, tuner etc.) there may be a blown output stage. I've seen a few of these, always in the left channel (curiously). Rather than mess around with troubleshooting individual transistors, I just replace all transistors and diodes in the output stage. See my substitution list. Mouser, MCM and Digikey electronics can help with all these transistors. MCM has the most direct substitutes. The substitution list has detailed info. A transistor checker is useful, but not required. Transistor kits are available on my Repair page. I've occasionally seen a dead channel due to failure of a passive component like a resistor.

• No stereo signal and/or muting circuit non-functioning - I've seen this in a few units, and traced it each time to Q802, a 2N5245 FET in the muting circuit. These transistors are available from MCM.

Updates: About a dozen changes and updates were issued by Advent over the years. The most important ones are presented here.

Output transistor insulators - if yours are a pink or light green silicon plastic, replace these with mica insulators and heat sink grease. This improves heat transfer and transistor cooling.

If you have hum in the phono preamp, add a grounding strap as shown to prevent ground loops.

Tuner warm up drift. replace C510. This is a 20 pf ceramic unit, and the temperature coefficient is critical. The capacitance must change with temperature to compensate for drift in the tuning coils as they heat up. Typical temp coefficient codes are N330, N470 and N750. For example, N330 = 330 ppm drift per ° C. If you have a 20 pf N750 installed, replace it with 20 pf N470. If you have N470, go to N330 or N750. These caps may be hard to find. Tuner drift is difficult to fix, but swapping these caps will get you close.

Back home to ADVENT

Back to Dave's Home