View attachment 38668
Sorry, I'm not baller like some of you guys but I was pretty happy yesterday. I've had this SX-828 for years but it needed a little bit of TLC, so it was living in the basement with my other unfinished projects. For some reason yesterday I got a hair up my ass to finally take care of it. All of the switches and pots were scratchy, so it just needed a deoxit bath, but on this particular model the pots are hard to get to (you have to take the unit half apart to get at them) so I had been putting it off. Anyway it's done now, and the only issue that it still has is that the "stereo" indicator lamp is burned out, but I have a replacement. This sounds so much better than the BPC amp that it replaced. Now I just need to find some nice desktop/bookshelf speakers to go with it, as the ones pictured are just some big-box store home theater speakers that someone gave me.
The SX-828 was actually the top-of-the-line receiver in Pioneer's product line in 1972, and cost about $480 back then (which is almost $2500 today). Crazy. I actually have my rooftop antenna hooked into it, and combined with its excellent tuner I can pull in just about any FM station under the sun. Would be cool if I had a nice AM antenna I guess, but I can listen to baseball games with my satellite subscription.
The headphones that Ash gave me for Christmas also sound about 10x better with this receiver than they did with the BPC POS. Thanks again, Ash!