I LOVE my Yamaha YP-450. It's as heavy as my mom's Cordoba (without the rust), it's built like my dad's Harley (without the oil leaks), and it's as easy to work on as my mountain bike. The only thing I didn't love about the machine was the rinky-dink 1970ish interconnects.
I had a 3 foot set of Monster Cable 400's laying around. I couldn't very well cut the grass, go fishing, or mountain biking in this weather. Today, I decided to chop those Monster Cables up and make them the new interconnects on my YP-450.
It went smooth. Here are a few pics, with some minor details describing the mods that had to be done in order to accommodate the larger diameter cabling.
As you can see above, I removed the original interconnects by heating up the old solder. I stripped the coating off of the Monster Cables to find that they had a 3rd set of wire strands inside, which acted as the conductor to channel any interference picked up by the shielding to ground. I then attached the Monster Cables via solder, making sure to ground the cable shielding. Also, the ground wire itself was paper thin and brittle, so I replaced it with 14ga speaker cable.
I had to modify the protective housing that shields the tonearm wiring by bending it outward. I could have ground it down and filed off the sharp edges, but, eh. I saw that as being redundant.
The rear panel was channeled for the original cables. I enlarged the channel using a round file. The Monster Cables and the ground wire fit snugly.
"Home, home again..."
