Beyond the list of standard restoration steps detailed on the main page, here are some added notes for this unit :

I bought this on ebay based on the excellent cosmetics and discounted price due to loud popping from amplifier.  It was well packed and arrived in fine condition.

I have wanted to work on a CR800 ever since restoring a CR400 last year.  The “00” series is my favorite Yamaha receiver line and the CR800 did not disappoint.  This receiver jam-packs several boards into a fairly small volume, but the engineers added ways to slide/pivot the chassis to gain access for easy servicing.  The Yamaha “20” receiver series saw a shift to fewer/large boards which has advantages (less cabling, etc), but not as fun to work on IMHO.

As I began initial testing, I noted the loud popping issue after about 20 minutes of warm up and isolated the preamp from the amp (switch on back) to show that the issue was in the amplifier.  I pulled and tested transistors from the amplifier board, but (as expected) all tested fine since this was an intermittent noise issue (not a constant failure).  Leaving the output transistors alone, I worked backwards replacing  transistors with recommended equivalents until the the popping noise was eliminated.  Hours of listening since then continued to prove that this issue is totally resolved.

Other functional testing went great except the AM tuner (which was totally dead).  This turned out to be a bad AM bar antenna.  As these are hard to find, I decided to get a working unit from my Yamaha CR600 I had yet to restore.  AM now functions correctly.

The lamps for the tuner pointer and meters are in great shape and shine brightly.  Based on the very clean exterior and interior, I believe this receiver was very lightly used so decided to leave these bulbs in place.

Recap went smoothly.  I used Kemet PEH caps ($$) for the main amplifier supplies as they have excellent temperature, ripple, ESR and lifetime specs.

This receiver has has an unusually high number of transistors, and I replaced 49 of them (!) that were on the AudioKarma “replace on sight” list.   

The FM tuner works really well and needed little adjustment.  It has very good sensitivity/separation and just sounds great.

Final functional testing complete/passed.  

The cosmetics are very (very) good.  The faceplate and cabinet are blemish-free.  This is an exceptionally clean example.

Something to be aware of is that the CR800 shipped with 2 different metal grills during its production run.  Many you will see on line have a thinner grill while others have the somewhat deeper grill like this example has.  I am guessing that Yamaha decided more ventilation was better and made this running change.  The bottom line is that both grills are “correct”   If you like the thin grill, then this one is not for you 🙂