OK I'm trying to bridge the contacts where the balance knob used to be on a
Mitsubishi R11 receiver. I've completed this operation successfully on a Sanyo
and it was quick and simple, but the Mitsubishi receiver is doing nothing but
confusing me. The balance knobs on these old receivers always go bad and I
prefer removing them rather than trying to fix or replace them. With the Sanyo
I just removed the balance knob and bridged contacts on either side of the
wiper where the pot was - so simple! But when I try this on the Mitsubishi, I
get the channel I bridge coming over both Left and Right channels as mono, and
the level is somehow decoupled from the volume knob! I managed to poke around
and find a way to bridge the channels so that the volume knob works, and the
channels are 'weighted' in their proper directions, but the left still 'bleeds'
slightly into the right channel and the right channel bleeds slightly into the
left. This is not acceptable, and seems pretty weird to me. Could it be that
balance knob (which was two stacked 250k pots) used the 250k resistence of the
pot turned all the way in either direction to silence the bleed of one channel
into the next? Has anyone ever seen an amplifier wired up like that? Seems
like a really poor way to wire an amp, if that is indeed how its supposed to
work. The Sanyo had the balance pot grafted to another pot beside it in order
for the one knob to turn two channels, whereas the Mitsubishi has the second
channel pot stacked behind the first. Perhaps one was wired in series and the
other parallel? I even found a pdf of the service manual for the Mitsubishi
and it doesn't help with this at all.

Any comments whatsoever would be appreciated...