#82 RME ADI-8 DS teardown and repair

 A seller on eBay had had a couple of these units listed as faulty for a few weeks, and once i had a bit of spare cash, i decided to take the dive and snap these up. The impetus was two-fold - on one hand, as it turns out, there seems to be a bit of a "disease" going around with power supplies in RME rack units; and on the other hand not long ago, i had noticed an ad from a person in this area actually looking to buy exactly one of these units.

Some extra motivation was prompted by looking up some prices for this thing. Borderline-eyewatering, i'd say. It seems to have retailed somewhere in the 1500e area at launch (1280GBP in 2003), and still selling for anything between 500-800e used (on Reverb.com or Milk Audio Store). Gulp.....

The shipping time was spent more or less being anxious whether i had bought a couple of lemons (for all i knew, the power supplies were missing altogether), or whether i would manage to catch a break and manage to fix these up easily and make some extra cash for the holidays.

#81 MOTU Traveler teardown & upgrade

As a follow-up to the recently posted MOTU Ultralite teardown, i had to grab this as soon as it popped up in my search results, because it had a price i couldn't ignore or refuse, and it had the ideal feature set for recording my band's jams and rehearsals. While the former had most of the features i needed in the 828mk2 i had been using, but in a smaller form factor, this Traveler packs more of the features i need (two extra mic preamps, while retaining the -10dBV/+4dBu line inputs with optional 6dB boost), in an intermediate form factor, as well as having a full 53dB of gain available on the mic preamps, but without weirdo custom potentiometers to wear out. Just about best of all worlds, really, especially for the paltry 85e this cost me. And as the cherry on top, it even has a separate battery input - hello, fully mobile recording sessions...

 

 

#76 Fractal Audio Axe-FX II teardown and repair

A couple weeks back, an acquaintance contacted me about his Axe-FX II suddenly not powering up anymore. I saw this as an opportunity to at the very least take a peek under the hood of one of these things (still selling for four-figure amounts), so why not?

I had neglected to snap photos of the outside of the thing (because other priorities), so you'll have to settle for some "stock" shots. Not that there's anything overly interesting to see anyway.

#72 MOTU 828 mk3 teardown

Yet another eBay score - caught this one with a blown power supply. Blown, as in, skidmark inside the casing, circuit board scorched, tracks vaporized. But maybe i'll make that into another article on its own, someday. In the mean time, let's take a peek under the hood of one of these arguable "classics".

#67 Audient iD22 part 2: the repair

 And now, getting back to the issue affecting this unit... As pointed out in the ad, the LT3439 apparently used to have a piddly little heatsink glued on top of it, but it got detached. Now, there's a chicken-and-egg type mystery here - did the heatsink glue fail because the chip overheated in the first place? Or did the chip get fried because the heatsink fell off? Regardless, investigation showed that one of the two switching transistors inside the chip seems to be stuck in a conducting state, despite the transistor itself not being shorted, though. But since it handles all the power for the analog circuitry, it's no shocker (no pun intended) that only the digital ins & outs work. 

#61 MOTU 896 mk3 Hybrid teardown (post-recap)

Since relatively recently acquiring the MOTU 8M, once i got around to swapping it out for the 896 mk3 in my recording rack, i figured it might be worth doing a quick teardown of the latter, before i sell it off. I've done a really brief one over on the BadCaps.net forums when i first bought it, but it deserves some higher-res photos and a more detailed documentation of its guts. Do keep in mind that it got re-capped as soon as i got my hands on (or into?) it, so the electrolytics are not stock. But
without further ado...

#32 M-Audio (Avid) Fast Track C600 teardown & repair

This little bugger, an M-Audio / Avid Fast Track C600, was listed as faulty on eBay - description said it would no longer power up, regardless of it being bus-powered or having its own external power supply connected. Got it shipped for 30eu / $30, so why not?

#3 MOTU 8Pre teardown & gain adjustment pot replacement

On the latest drum tracking session i surprisingly discovered that channel 8 on the MOTU 8pre in my recording rig was noisy and useful-signal-less. This same unit had a similar issue with channel 6 when i bought it (as faulty, with a shot Firewire chip).

Fortunately, when i was about to take care of ch6, i got two replacement pots. When investigating the issue, i had read it's a relatively common occurrence, so i figured that as long as i'm contacting the local MOTU distributor, might as well get an extra / spare one, just in case (especially since i had two 8Pres at the time).