Vintage/Budget Amp required.

[mudd]

If you want a truly great integrated amp, with a quality phono stage, you can't beat the Pioneer A400 from the early 1990s. You can find them for under £100.
This amp was described as out performing amps that cost over £1000 when it was new. I recently looked into replacing mine on a budget of £700 to £1000. My local Hi-Fi dealer said their integrated amps start at £700 and they couldn't offer me anything at my budget, that would sound better than an A400 even now!
I love my A400.

[neep]

If you have two speakers, hook them up to output A. The reason it has A+B - 8-32 ohms is that if you have two sets of 8 ohm speakers playing together, the amp sees a 4 ohm load. If you had two 4 ohm speakers, the amp would see 2 ohms. Many amps will start to oscillate with a 2ohm load and fry. So you can only use two sets if they are both 8 ohms or more.

So, that means I simply add them in series? Each speaker has four terminals in total, and each channel on the amp has four -

[neep]

I love my A400.

I bought an A-450R for £50 mint condition. Even the guy who sold it me said I got it for a steal.

[raphaelmabo]

Hook up red to red and black to black.
If you have two red and blacks on the speakers, then they are ok with what is called "bi-wiring" = two sets of cables for each speakers - the bass/mid and tweeter having separate connectors for the speaker cable. But you can use them with single wire also, they are connected with a metal plattern that connects the two sets together so you can feed only one set with cables. If you remove this metal plattern, then you can use double wires.

Now your amplifier has two sets of speaker output. You have the choice of single-wire or bi-wire.
Single wire - connect the speakers to the A speaker outputs.
Bi-wire - connects the speakers to both A and B (here you probably needs to engage both speaker outputs by a button or selector on the front), like A to the tweeters and B to the bass/mid.

On the speakers - the upper red and blacks are for the tweeters (treble) and the lower red and blacks are for the bass and midrange.

[Ottermel]

That's not the way to go though!!
I would not connect ONE set of speakers to TWO speaker terminals on the amp (bi-wire or not)!
Gotta watch the impedances too!
This was not meant for such connections!
Especially if you connect the tweeter to A output and the woofer to B output. This is asking for trouble.
Perhaps someone with more electronic knowledge may pipe in here.

[Alec124c41]

Just connect the A outputs on the amp to the bottom connectors on the speakers.

Cheers,
Alec

[lini]

Ottermel: That would only be problematic, if he had one of not really many amps/receivers on which the outputs for the speaker pairs A and B weren't simply wired in parallel (as it's usually done). But in his case it would be no problem to use both outputs for bi-wiring purposes - at least from a technical point of view (i.e. regarding safety of operation). Actually one could even regard that as better than using only one port for bi-wiring. Whether bi-wiring makes any sense at all, would be another question, though...

Greetings from Munich!

Manfred / lini

[lini]

neep: No worries, you made a fair deal with your new Pioneer. Just hook up your speakers as Alec suggested above, and you'll be fine (and don't worry about bi-wiring, 'cause from an electrical poin of view that's more or less just a waste of good cable - while bi-amping can actually make sense, but you'd need a second amp/power-amp for that purpose...). However, I'd like to suggest you to rather go for a Dual 505-2, -3 or -4 instead of the plain 505 or 505-1, 'cause the latter two still sport Dual's 2nd gen. proprietary ULM mount - while the later incarnations from the 505-2 onward sport a headshell with standard halfinch-mount instead, with which you would face much less problems/limitations in terms of cartridge choice.

Greetings from Munich!

Manfred / lini

[neep]

Thanks for the replies. I've got everything set up, and it works! There's one slight issue though, the speakers produce quite a noticeable buzzing sound. I can't seem to locate the problem though. Any ideas what it could be?

[duficity]

Try to isolate which speaker its coming from, woofer, mid or tweeter. Sounds to me like a blown speaker.

[raphaelmabo]

I would not connect ONE set of speakers to TWO speaker terminals on the amp (bi-wire or not)!

There's in general not a problem doing so, and it can be beneficial to the sound. There are some debating about if bi-wire is getting better sound or not, however just try it and listen and see what you like. However it does cost twice the money since you need double pairs of cables, and this is really what the debate is about - two sets of cheap wire or one set of expensive wire, which sounds the best? But two sets of expensive wire sounds better than one set of expensive wire, but for the money of the two sets you could buy one set of even more expensive wire... and so on.

[neep]

Try to isolate which speaker its coming from, woofer, mid or tweeter. Sounds to me like a blown speaker.

It's definitely not that. It's down to my turntable not having a ground terminal. I tested with a grounded cable by attaching it to the spindle, and the hum/buzz vanished. It is quite problematic, since there's very little information about this turntable on the internet. I heard some turntables don't require a ground, since they ground themselves through the RCA connectors.

[neep]

Well, after using the principal of electron flow, I simply wired a ground from the negative of the turntable, to the ground on the amp - NO BUZZING! I can finally enjoy my vinyls in peace!

I've got to say, I'm glad I stumbled upon this website. It's helped me countless times when I've been lost, or just simply listening to other peoples experiences. I'll be staying here for sure.

Thanks everyone!

[raphaelmabo]

It is true that some turntables doesn't have a grounding wire so they use an internal grounding instead (some Regas are like this), but the Dual CS 505-1 has a separate grounding wire. Perhaps it is missing on your sample? (the wire is thin and weak, perhaps it was broken...)

Here is the instruction manual...
http://www.vinylengine.com/ve_downloads ... _505-1.pdf

Anyway it seems like you got it sorted out so that's good...