...it's not just the contact printing frame you need to worry about - the light traps on a lot of 70's cameras is disintegrating, too! Minolta & -even, dare I say Leica R's are affected, though my 1937 Contax III is too old to have used such new-fangled materials!

Surely the Beomasters 5000,5500 etc have a pair of 'line out' sockets? I certainly use by BM 5000 with a apir of AVI monoblocks this way. The earlier BeoMaster 6000 was different, though: when I tried the same trick with that, I found that the 'pre-out' came before the volume control!

S 80, S 80.2, M 150 all suffer serious rot in my experience. C40, C75, Cx50 & Cx100 do also, but more variably. The sunlight thesis may be true as one of a pair may be affected but not the other, but that could also be heat, if one of the pair is closer to a radiator/fire/window. I can't make any further helpful comment as all mine have been

'Best' receiver will always be difficult... partly depending on which inputs you are going to use most. My experience has been with the 6000 (stereo, sloping front), 5000, 5500 & 8000, driving Beovox Cx50 (hard to tell, frankly), Quad ESL63s & IMF Studios. With the Quad & IMF 'speakers, which are revealing (& in the case

While a 'stuck' speaker is a major problem, at least it doesn't make a Beolit of the 1970s completely useless. As a student in the '70s in London, we suffered frequent power cuts (even if the electricity bill had been paid): I at leaststill had good music with my Beolit 700 driving one of my 'big' speakers from the Hi-Fi system. O.K., it was mono, but

My Master Control Panel 5000 has suddenly ceased to work. New batteries worked for a few seconds, cleaning the contacts did the same, but now it's completely dead. Any bright ideas? I believe that the frequencies used were unique to the 5000-series, so 'One4All' or other 'universal' or 'programmable' remote controls wouldn't be an option. Back to e

I fitted my new, shiny tacho disc a few days ago. The surgery was annoyingly tricky: not fitting the disc, but removing the hub assembly. Actually, the fitting was easy - the reassembly was the problem, due to migration of the mounts of the suspension of the deck assembly, which fell off every time I tried to close the case. Steady hands, good light

I've now had my 're-tipped' MMC5 for long enough to try it properly, including a test disc. It had a broken cantilever - the stylus & the end were missing - and 'Expert Stylus' in Ashtead replaced the cantilever with a sapphire one (it looks to me as if they bonded the new cantilever onto the cut-down stump of the old one) & fitted their own variey