1960s Stereo Console Gets an Upgrade
Faced with an old console stereo from the 1960s that was barely functional, [Sherman Banks] aka W4ATL decided to upgrade its guts while keeping its appearance as close to the original as possible. This stereo set is a piece of mahogany furniture containing an AM/FM stereo receiver and an automatic turntable from JCPenny’s Penncrest line. As best [Sherman] can determine, it is most likely a 1965 model. The old electronics were getting more and more difficult to repair and the tuner was drifting off-station every 15 minutes. He didn’t want to throw it away, so he decided to replace all the innards.
The first thing was to tear out the old electronics while retaining the chassis proper. The new heart of the entertainment center is a modern Denon AV stereo receiver. This unit can be controlled over Ethernet, has a radio tuner, inputs for SiriusXM and a turntable, and supports Bluetooth streaming. [Sherman] next replaced the 1965 turntable, and then turned his attention to connecting up the controls and indicators.
The potentiometers were replaced with equivalent ones of lower resistance, the neon stereo indicator was replaced with an LED, but the linear tuning dial proved to be a nearly two month challenge and resulted in a cool hack. In brief, he connected an optical rotary encoder to the tuning knob and used a stepper motor with a linear actuator to control the dial indicator. All this is controlled from an Arduino Mega 2560 with three shields for I/O and LAN. But there was still one remaining issue — without vacuum tubes to warm up, the radio would play immediately after power-on. [Sherman] fixed that by programming the Arduino to slowly ramp up the volume at the same rate as the original tube receiver. And finally, he installs a small HDMI monitor in the corner to display auxiliary information and metadata from the Denon receiver.
Check out the videos below the break. We wrote about a couple of similar conversions in the past: this one from 2018 was also a Penncrest, and from last year this COVID isolation project that emphasized the addition of a new liquor cabinet.
