Saba 300 Automatic-Stereo/11 issues

[vortalexfan]

Originally Posted by Josef

There are different possibilities in replacing an ECL86:

A PCL86 will work but needs a higher heater voltage.

If your are not interested in keeping the radio original you could try to replace the two ECL86 with an ECC83 and two EL84 including a lot of soldering and I guess unwanted modifications. Also keep in mind that the required heater current will be quite higher in this case.

Another idea is replacing them with ECL82 which are older, have less output power and a different pinout but: this tube usually lasts much longer than ECL86.
If the SABA chassis is handwired it might be worth a try.

Just to mention: I never tried some of these ideas out because I usually avoid radios with ECL86 which I absolutely don't like

Hi there, thanks for the heads up about the ECL86 tube, its kind of funny because I was watching a recent Shango066 youtube video where he was working on an early 1960s Packard-Bell Stereo System which used a set of ECL86 tubes in it for the output stage and he too had one ECL86 tube that tested bad which he was going to replace the two tubes with some NOS ones until he saw the price of them (like I did, and got sticker shock).

So he just decided to leave them be, and he ended up having a severely out of alignment tuner section which was causing his problems as far as a lack of volume goes in tuner mode, because tape and phono mode were plenty loud, but the tuner section was super quiet, like in this radio's case.

But since this is a German radio the only service information I have which is a service manual in the back of the cabinet which is in German and in broken English I don't know if I would have a very easy time realigning this radio or not.