Alpine 3503 Car Audio Amp

[linuxguru]

Found two leaking Nichicon VZ 2200/16 in an Alpine 3503 car amplifier from the early 90s. Date Code on the caps is 9138 - probably 1991, 38th week. All other caps (mostly in the signal path and small bypass/bootstrap) were Elna RE2 and seem to be fine. The VZs were the main power supply bypass caps for the NEC chip-amps, and were leaking brown electrolyte from the lower seal - no bulging was seen. The unit was made in Taiwan, R.O.C, but all components seem to be Japanese.

Replaced with Panasonic FC 1000/25 (anything larger was too tall, and I didn't have any suitable 16v caps lying around) and the sound improvement was dramatic - it's now better than new, with excellent tonality, depth and detail.

[Kaine]

Re: Alpine 3503 Car Audio Amp

that's great news

I'm a big alpine fan, i'd love to see a shot of the internals if you happened to take any

[tvtech]

Re: Alpine 3503 Car Audio Amp

Its common for those older nichicon capacitors to leak and go open.The rubber seal on the bottom rots and the electrolyte leaks out corroding the circuit board and other components.If there are any more black nichicon capacitors in that amp I would also replace those because if they aren't already leaking they will be soon.Ususally the dark blue case nichicon capacitors aren't affected by this problem and would leave them alone unless you suspect they are bad.Keep an eye on those elna caps too because certain series are know leakers,they caused lots of problems in the vertical and audio output sections of older toshiba tv's