Apogee Big Ben Auto-Power

I'm rearranging stuff in my studio at the moment and one of the pieces of equipment that I had to move was the Apogee Big Ben. I had an annoying problem with it for a long time and that is that I had to manually switch it on every time after I applied power to it. I wanted it to switch on with the power and at first I though that was not possible. Until...... I read the manual ;) Oh yes they can be helpful sometimes! :) I turned out that I had to switch a jumper on the inside for this.

The problem is though that the Big Ben is literally the heart of my studio since it provides a clock (heart beat) for all the digital equipment in my studio, so I didn't want to take it out just for this, but today I was moving it anyway. And that is quite an undertaking since 6 separate Word Clock busses are connected to that and when you move the box you also have to move the cabling and of course after that you end up with some cable that are too long and some that are too short :(

So when I took it out of the rack I opened it up right away. In the picture above you can see what is inside the machine. Not much right :) Well it is not much what it does, but it does it provides a very stable clock. In the picture on the left you can see the jumper. Apogee proudly states that they put it there because they didn't want to have any dip switches on the outside??? What is the benefit of that exactly? Too convenient for the customers??  Ah well I changed the setting and now it neatly turns on with everything else. So problem solved and it is also in the new position now with everything working. I'll post an update soon about all the changes that I'm currently doing, but I think I typed enough on this Christmas Evening already :)