#94 Apogee Symphony Thunderbridge teardown

As mentioned in the previous post, that Symphony I/O came bundled with an Apogee Symphony Thunderbridge PC-32 to Thunderbolt adapter. Just this on its own seems to sell for more than i paid for the entire package... But let's see what makes this bugger tick, shall we?

 

#93 Apogee Symphony I/O (mkI) teardown

Right, so, a few weeks ago (actually, well over a month ago - dang, time flies...), i stumbled upon a German eBay auction for what seemed to be an Apogee Symphony I/O, a Symphony 64 Thunderbridge, and the cable to connect the two, sold as faulty / untested. I turned out to be the only bidder (after there were none, the first time the listing was put up), and especially after seeing some "sold" prices both on eBay and Reverb.com, i decided a bit under 200e was worth taking a chance on. About a week later, i picked up the package from the post and, as it turned out, at least the main box, the Symphony I/O, was actually working perfectly fine!.. 

I had to cobble together a DB25 male to 8x XLR "pigtail" to be able to test the line inputs & outputs, but that was a small price to pay for confirming the functioning of this thing. Well, that, and the OLED display situated between the two knobs on the front seems to be dead (replacement's ~20 bucks) - only discovered that upon seeing a video how to switch the thing to "USB Audio" mode. But let's see what's inside this then, shall we? 

#57 Apogee Ensemble Firewire pt.2 - the repair

I was considering making the previous post about the repair as well, but once the teardown part of it was done, i decided it had gotten long enough already, so here's the testing and (hopefully) repair of it, separately.

#56 Apogee Ensemble Firewire teardown

[[[ Repair can be found here ]]]

This came up on eBay the other week as faulty - inputs 1/2 and outputs 1/2 seemingly dead. First instinct was, 'obviously', look up photos online in the hope of finding some internal shots. A few minutes later, bingo: four CS4272's in there. Now, what're the odds one of them is handling the bad pair of ins & outs? Quite a bit higher than the analog input of one, and the analog output of another to be bad, wouldn't you say? But let's not get ahead of ourselves (too much), and take things one step at a time...