RME Fireface 800 Repair

Yesterday evening is was working with Remy Stroomer in my studio on our upcoming collaboration album. When we done and still talking about all kinds of stuff suddenly a loud bang occurred in the studio, followed by another one and it smelled very burned. So something broke down, but I could see right away what. Then suddenly I saw that all the lights on my RME Fireface 800 started flickering and it went dark. I immediately cut the power from it and unscrewed it from the rack. It was very hot to start with, which wasn't a good sign. When we opened it up. The first thing I noticed was an capacitor that seem to have exploded.

It was already late so I called it a night and started looking further this morning. Since we heard two bangs I suspected there must have been another capacitor that exploded. The first thing to look at was the power supply. And I found it quickly. I expect that the first capacitor that blew was in the 48 Volt circuit of the microphone input I used last week, since that input was already acting funny. Probably after that one blew it also took one out on the power supply that feeds the 48 Volt to the input. And my suspicions were correct.

After this I de-soldered these two broken capacitor and some other ones that looked suspicious and drove to the local electronics store. Unfortunately they didn't have two of the capacitors that I wanted to replace as a precaution, but they did have the rest and most important the replacements for the exploded ones. After carefully screwing the main board and power supply back in place I first put power on the power supply without the main board attached to it. I could measure some stable voltages on the connector so I reapplied them and everything seemed to work based on the led sequence that I'm used to when it powers on.

I left it running on the bench for a while and nothing got abnormally hot or anything so I decided to put it back in place. And guess what :) It worked perfectly again. It is always nice when you can repair something like this yourself. Feels very satisfying and of course saves an expensive repair from RME. If they would actually repair it in the first place. My experiences with them are not that good actually in that sense. OK I guess I can take a cup of coffee now to reward myself :) Back to music!

Eventide H8000 Back from USA

My H8000 was broken a while ago and I have tried to repair it myself, but didn't really succeed. Eventually I decided to sent it to Eventide in the USA to let them have a look and they found that the socket for the main processor was loose. This seems to be a common problem, so they desoldered the socket from the PCB and soldered the SMD mounted main processor directly on the PCB. Besides that they also repaired the big dial knob on the front panel. Last week I got it back and I started playing around with it. Man what a machine this is. I wouldn't want to miss it again. I bought an Eventide H4000DSP in the mean to fill in the gap. It has a couple of the same presets. Now that the H8000 is back I'm going to sell the H4000DSP again.

SammichSID Repair

Today I heated up the solder iron again. It was a really long time ago that I used it due to all kinds of other projects. The first thing I wanted to do today is repair the SammichSID. I had been laying disassembled on my desk for a long time and I always worry then that parts might be lost. I found out earlier that it was behaving strangely because two leds didn't function properly. Actually this is the first time in my life that I encountered leds being broken, but apparently it can happen.

Luckily I was able to buy the exact same leds on E-bay from a shop in Hong Kong. Otherwise I had to replace them all. First I cut the leads of the old leds and tested them while out of the PCB. They still didn't work so my diagnose was right. I de-soldered the cut of leads from the PCB and then put in the new ones. After that I tested it and everything was fine :) I also upgraded the SammichSID to the latest OS and then couldn't resist playing on it for a while. The sound coming from those Commodore SID chips is still something special for me :) OK. At least I could take one point of my todo list again today :)

VGA Monitor Repair

This morning when I entered the studio one of my screens acted a bit strange. It switched on and of immediately again and then it tried again. I hesitated for about 15 second and then decided to go and try to repair it myself first. I saw this behavior before with the Behringer REV-2496 I repaired a while ago, so I suspected the power supply right away. But the biggest challenge turned out to open it up. The case is made of plastic and it all fits very tight. This took me about an hour :)

When it was open it was easy to spot the power supply and a closer investigation showed me two electrolytic capacitors right away that looked suspicious. On the top they are not flat anymore, but it looks like their are under pressure. Usually those are the bad guys. So I took the power supply PCB with me to the local electronics shop and took new capacitors with a bit higher voltage rating than the original with me.

And here is the lot that I took out. I actually replaced all of them just to be safe. It was about 5 euro's worth of material so I could take a chance with that. Luckily the power supply PCB is a single sided one, so de-soldering the capacitors was quite easy. When the new ones were in I switched it on and nothing happened. Oops.. Did I do something wrong? Instinctively I felt all the capacitors and one got very warm. So I switched the power off immediately. And then I saw I put it in the wrong orientation. Stupid me.

I de-soldered that one again and took a new one to replace it. Again just to be on the safe side. And then I could only hope that this stupid mistake didn't break anything else. But luckily that was not the case. I guess I was quick enough powering it down again. So after that I reassembled the whole thing again. That was a lot easier by the way than taking it apart since now I understood how the construction worked. And here is another picture with a fully operational VGA monitor again :) Now back to work!

Korg Poly 800 Repair

As you might have noticed I'm currently selling some of my synthesizers. I had some synths where I just couldn't find a nice spot for anymore and after the Musik Messe I really want to buy the Roland Jupiter 80 and Korg Kronos. So I need even more room now and money. One of the synths I wanted to sell was the Korg Poly 800 that I hardly ever use anymore. But when I tested it some of the knobs on the front panel didn't work that well. So this morning I decided to open it up and investigate what was wrong with it.

I actually expected that some of the switches would be the problem so I started by disconnecting all the wiring from the PCB that holds the knobs and took my multimeter to test all the individual switches. But after doing that they all seemed to work. Then I started to see how the knobs are interfaced and I saw quite quickly that they were arranged in a scan matrix with some diodes on the PCB. So after that I measured all the individual diodes and they turned out OK as well.

So then I started to look on the main PCB where the scan lines were going. And I decided to go and see what happened there with the oscilloscope. So I rewired everything back and starting pressing some knobs. And to my surprise all the knobs worked again. So probably there were just some loose connections on the inter PCB wiring. That was the easiest fix ever I think :) Well at least now you know what a Poly 800 looks like on the inside.

And here it is on the outside. As you can see it is a reversed keys version. At the time I thought it was cool, but now all I can think is that it doesn't fit my other synths :) And since I have enough analog poly synths now I have no need for it any longer. And in the mean time I also have a buyer for it already so it will leave my studio soon. In the mean time I also sold my Alesis Andromeda A6, Roland RS-09 and Roland SH-09. And more is going soon, as said before to make room for nicer new machines. If you like a list of what else I'm selling just let me know, but I have to warn you up front: I don't ship anything so local pickup in The Netherlands only.

Behringer V-Verb Repair

Recently my Behringer V-Verb (REV-2496) broke down. It was my first digital reverb and it actually is quite a nice machine. There is one preset in there called 'Gold Plate' that sounds really good in my opinion. I have used it a lot in the past, but lately it didn't want to switch on anymore. All the lights went on and after 10 minutes or so sometimes it suddenly started working. But then I had some bad spikes on my digital audio path the last days and found out that it was the Behringer causing this so I took it out the rack.

I informed about the possibility to repair it, but then I was told I'd better throw it away and buy a used one back. Well I was not intending to do this, because first of all I hate throwing stuff away and besides that I was not planning on spending money on a new one. So I decided to open it up. I suspected a problem with the power supply since it did work when it was on longer. The spikes suspected me that maybe some capacitors were broken and guess what? I spotted right away that at least 4 capacitors were expanded and there was on two even a substance on it. If you click the picture you can see it up close yourself.

So this morning I went to me local electronics shop and bought some new capacitors. Then I took the power supply out and de-soldered the old capacitors. The new ones were not the exact same size, but luckily they did fit. For the new capacitor I took a bit higher voltage types by the way because I hope they will last longer then. In the picture on the left you can see the power supply with on the left the old capacitor and on the right the new ones. All in all not more than an hour work by the way including taking it apart and reassembling everything.

Then the exciting moment came to try it out. First I applied power to the power supply while it was still disconnected from the other electronics. Well no bang and no smoke came. So far so good ;) Then I connected the power supply back to the rest and switched it on. And happy days :) It worked. It switched on right away. I still have to get it back in the rack and see if those audio spikes are gone, but I have very good hope for that. So another successful repair project :)

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 :)

Eventide H8000 Problems

Last year I got an Eventide H8000 from E-bay. In my opinion one of the best Sound Effect Processors on Earth. Unfortunately in the beginning it worked fine, but after a while it started to do a bit weird. It started with the display that is very bright when it starts up and after a while it changes color. Important? No, but strange it is. So far I could live with that. Then it started losing its ADAT settings everytime I switch it off. So each time I have to reconfigure them when I switch in on and the strange thing is that it is all correct in the menu.

So I just re-apply the same settings and it works again. I mailed with  Eventide tech support about this and they had no idea. The only tip they had is to open it up and check the battery and reapply all the mechanical interconnects, like connectors and IC sockets. Well and today also the jog shuttle stopped working. So today I decided to have a look at it. I took it from the rack and opened it up. Well in the picture you can see a H8000 from the inside. The Battery was under the ADAT interface, so I took that out first. And measured the battery. It was 3 Volts like it should be.

Anything below 2.8 Volts could be a problem they said and that is obviously not the case. I decided to remove the battery for a while to make sure the memory was completely empty. And then I reapplied all the mechanical connections, just to be sure. After that I put it back in the rack and reconfigured it again, turned the power off and unfortunately the problem was still there. I have no idea what else I could do myself about it, so I guess I'll have to ship it to them for maintenance. I hope they can fix it. I'll keep you posted.

Waldorf MicroWave 1 Rom Update

I have had a Waldorf MicroWave in my studio for a long time. It is a very nice digital wave table synthesizer with analog filters. It sounds really sweet, but my friend Hanz told me that it could sound even better. I still had the old OS Roms in there. So he pointed me to some Roms on E-bay that I could buy to upgrade it. Well actually I had these roms in my drawer for months already, but today I decided that it was time to finally install them into the MicroWave. So first thing was to get it out of the rack. Luckily the cables are long enough to even be able to test it this way.

And here are the new Roms. They are just normal Eproms so I guess when you have the software and an Eprom burner you could just burn them yourself, but I'm sure you can also find someone on E-bay that still sells them. As you can see mine came shipped in a nice antistatic box with some antistatic foam. There are two E-proms one is marked H for High and one is marked L for Low. I guess you can't go wrong there. So it was time to open up the Microwave. Opening it up is quite easy. You just have to remove 5 screws and you can lift of the top cover.

The Roms are in the upper left corner. I removed them using a small flat screw driver and my Roms were also marked H and L so that didn't require any puzzling. You just have to watch the oriention of the Roms. When I picked it up by the way I heard something moving inside the MicroWave and when I held it up side down a screw fell out :( I guess I was lucky that this screw never caused any short circuit. Well after screwing the lid back on I powered it up and it said version 2.0 so that looked good :) And then I put it back in the rack and played a bit on it. I think I will have to look up some new presets for it, but I'll ask my friend Hanz about that. Well another thing to scratch of my to-do list :)

Word Clock Problem Solved

The last week I was having an annoying problem in the studio. I use a lot of digital effects equipment and they all need to be synchronized. To do that you can use a Word Clock bus. One machine in the studio is a master clock generator and the other equipment slave their clock to that. You use a BNC coax cable to connect the equipment to this bus with T- or Y- connectors like the ones in the picture. On both ends this bus is terminated with a 75 ohm resistor. All nice when it works, but when there is a bad connection somewhere in this loop you get cracks and hickups. Usually when I had this I moved the cables a bit and it worked again for a while but today I decided to go and track this problem down. So armed with some new BNC cables and connectors I crawled behind my desk.

I found the problem quite quickly. In total I have 6 Word Clock busses originating from a Apogee Big Ben. The Big Ben has leds on the front that show the status of the loop. Since the led on loop 1 was going on and off each time I knew I which loop I had to check. It turned out to be the T-connectors I used on my RME interfaces caused the problem. Since they are just 1 unit high there is not much room on a T-connector for the cable. They are attached to the side. I replaced those T-connectors by Y-connectors that have the connections on the back. So here the cable goes straight out. The result is that there is no stress any more on those cables.

After this I didn't see the led blinking any more and I worked all day in the studio. So I guess the problem is fixed now. Quite a relief actually, since I am working on finishing a track for a sampler CD that has to be done next Friday. Well actually I had to be ready today even since it needs to be mastered before I can send it in and we will start working on that tomorrow. My work is done on the track now. Hopefully they will select it and if they do it will be released in August. I'll let you know as soon as I know myself. For now I'm going back on working on my new album for October.

Headphones Repaired

When I'm in the living room I often work with my headphones on, listening to some music. I have a pair of closed headphones for that so that my surrounding isn't bothered by me and vice versa. Usually I prefer open headphones btw, but anyway there was a lose wire in the somewhere because sometimes on one ear I lost sound and when I fiddled with the cable it worked again. So I decided to take it apart. One of the wires was loose on the plug, but the wires were to short to solder them back. So I extended them for about a centimeter, put it back together and it works perfectly again :)

PC Trouble Fixed

I had a very annoying problem with the second PC in my studio. This is not my main audio recording PC, but a PC that I use for video stuff, mastering stuff, sample editing and also some editors for synthesizers are running on it. It is nice that I can do stuff on there that doesn't interfere with recording. But recently it became very slow and after a while it completely froze. It lost it BIOS settings on restarting. I was thinking it was time for a new one, but I decided to have a look first. So I detached all external USB and firewire connections and started removing PCI and PCI-e cards on by one. Suddenly when I removed one of my USB PCI cards it worked fine. So this card probably messed up the PCI buss on the main board. Well I'm very happy that I can use it normally again :)

MFOS VC-LFO Repaired

During the last year I bought some Synth modules from E-bay, but I didn't have time to test them yet. One of them was this LFO module. I hooked it up to my newly build power supply and was a bit surprised that the led on the front panel didn't work. I hookup the output to my oscilloscope and there was signal coming from it, but it looked very strange. Like a 50 Hz hum added to all the outputs. When I studied the module closer I found it to be a MFOS VC-LFO (Music From Outer Space) with an Oakley front panel. I found the schematics quite quickly online. Isn't the Internet great for that? :) You can find almost anything on there in just a few second. I love that :) I can remember the old days where this would take weeks or even months.

The first thing I did after that was hook one of the power distribution boards that I got from MOTM to my lab power supply. Measuring on a live circuit always gives the risk of accidentally short circuiting something and this power supply is protected for that. You can also limit the current that can flow so nothing will burn out in case of a problem. The first thing I focused on what why the led didn't work. I put power on the led directly and it lid up, so it wasn't the led itself. One side of the led was connected to the PCB and the other side to the ground. Well I thought it was. Because after some tracing of the front panel wiring I found out that all the grounds were interconnected but there was no actual ground connection to the PCB.

So in the end I just soldered a wire from the front panel ground loop to the PCB and that didn't only solve the led problem but also the other problems I saw with the signal. After that I had a very stable output signal on all connections. In the documentation was also a calibrating procedure so I did that as well. It cost me a good part of the afternoon to solve this, but it always feels very satisfying when it works in the end :) Here you see another picture of the VC-LFO module hooked this time to the new dual power supply I build this morning. On to the next project :)

Kurzweil KSP8 Repaired

Last year I bought an Kurzweil Mangler FX processor and fell in love with one of the presets called 'Laserverb'. My friend Hans told me that I should look for a Kurzweil KSP8 then, because it has much more power and much more effects on board. I found a very nice set including an ADAT board installed and a remote controller and even an extra 8 channel AES board. When I hooked it up I couldn't get it running though. It worked on the Analog inputs and outputs and also the AES port worked, but I wanted to hook it up through ADAT to be able to use all 8 channels on it. It started already at the fact that it didn't want to sync its clock to the ADAT input. That gave me the impression the board was broken. Then I installed the AES board and everything worked fine. I decided to give to board a closer look and to my surprise I found a loose soldering just at the optical receiver for the ADAT input. I resoldered the whole connector put it back and it worked :) And boy is this thing nice!

Here you see a picture of the remote that came with it. A very convient way to control the unit. There are 8 rotary knobs on it to adjust the effect parameters and also a joystick to do some nice modulation stuff on some of the presets. I played around with some of the presets today and the KSP8 sounds awesome I can tell you. Especially the freaky stuff you can get from it is amazing. And having 8 channels is great. You use them as 8 x mono, 4 x stereo of even 5.1 surround. There are even surround presets in there. The KSP8 is being dumped for low prices everywhere on E-bay (even new). I can recommend it to you if you like good sounds effects. Only the ADAT and 8 channel AES boards are harder to come by. But if it is out of your budget look for the cheaper Mangler or Rumour from Kurzweil. My Mangler is going for sale soon by the way because the KSP8 out powers it by far.