Power Converter: Needed For This Panasonic?

Hi, there. Does anyone know of a good power converter brand? I'm thinking of buying a big, dual-cassette-deck/CD player Panasonic boombox from an eBay seller in Russia. The seller’s reply to my message was entirely in Russian. (Shrug)





From the eBay Rover translation, I gather that the Panasonic is designed for use only with 220V/240V circuits. A 220V-to-110V power converter will make the machine usable here in the United States. But is it worth the extra setup step or two? The Sharp GF-800H(S) that I got from a Ukrainian seller seemed to have survived my mistakenly running it for a few hours on 110V/120V circuitry with the device still set to work with Ukraine's 220V circuitry, as I noted in another Stereo2Go message post. Member Longman replied, stating that it is fortunate that the Sharp was set to run on 220 volts while accidentally being run on a 110-volt line; that, if it had been the other way around, there likely would have been "bang or smoke" from trying to use a 110V-set boombox on 220V-plus circuitry.





The Panasonic is being sold at auction, with a "Buy It Now" option for close to an extra $100 above the minimum bid. Has any S2G member here in North America bought a 220V boombox and run it on 110V/120V circuitry without ruining it?

 

You will not damage a box by under-powering it. It will simply fail to perform very well, if at all.

 

Thanks for the reply, Reli. A short, reasoned reply about electronic power, gadget performance and the risk (or lack thereof) of fried parts is in order.

 

For a boombox I would try to substitute its internal transformer, external 110-220V converter affects the idea of "portabililty"
If you have Service Manual you can check what is needed and then check if 110V transformer available

 

Yes a tech could easily replace the internal transformer with a 120V one, or even a universal one.

Otherwise you'll need to buy an external "step-up" converter capable of converting your household 110V into 220-240V

 

Most older equipment designed for use with batteries or mains has some kind of switch, often built into the mains socket to switch between the two.
It will also aim to have output of the mains PSU at about the same voltage as a fresh set of batteries. There are exceptions such as ones where the output running from mains is quoted as being higher than batteries but I guess 90% of boomboxes aim for the voltages to be about the same.

If you run a 230V Boombox from 110V then it is the equivalent of fitting almost flat batteries i.e ones giving out about 0.7V a cell.
At low volumes you might get away with it but it wouldn't be surprising if motor ran slow and the sound was very weak.

If you run a 110V boombox from 230V then it is the equivalent to fitting 3V Lithium batteries. As well as the risk of damaging things like the motor you risk damaging the power supply itself.

A few years ago I made the mistake of plugging a 120V model train transformer into 230V. The train set was actually French so I just assumed it would be 230V but apparently in the 1950s there was no standard voltage in France with different cities having different voltages The first thing I noticed was that the train was so fast it wouldn't stay on the track. After a few minutes trying to work out what was wrong I noticed smoke coming from the transformer and the paint on the top of the transformer starting to bubble !

To wrap this up some modern equipment like laptop PSUs can run from anything between 100V and 240V. However that is because they are full of electronics which can adjust them automatically.
If you look at the circuit of a boombox the PSU is probably just a transformer, brdge rectifier and a smoothing capacitor.

As Jorge and Reli have just suggested the transformer is the part that needs changing although in some boxes it might be easier to swap the whole PSU. The problem with just changing the transfomer is that it is quite likely to be soldered to a PCB so you need one with the same pin spacing etc.