#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.

#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...

#31 Warwick ProFET 5.1 bass amplifier teardown & maintenance

A local buddy just brought this German beastie in, citing a dicky DI output, and an unhealthy-sounding fan. Well, when i say "German", i mean the brand itself; as one might expect, it's "obviously" made in China, as it says on the back. But isn't nearly everything (else), anyway?

#30 Double Dock Day - HP HSTNN-I11X and Dell PR03X (USB 3.0) teardown

Right, so i had been on the lookout for a cheap docking station for my Dell Precision M4800 for a while, and the other week i stumbled across and ad on a local website about a clearance sale from a university - docking stations, laptop chargers, some desktops etc. When i finally got to their premises, instead of the $5-10 prices i expected, the guy there said i could have them for some coffee-change into the tip-jar, so i walked out with two PR03X's for a mere 40-50 cents or so - me happy!

The HP dock though, was about 15$, but came with a ma-HOO-sive 230W power brick, which is for another project; expect a teardown of the brick soon. Sadly the dock wouldn't fit my HP Elitebook 6930p (only the later xx40 Elitebooks), but that doesn't mean we can't take a peek under the skirts, and then resell it to make some of the money back, right?

#25 Behringer ADA8000 "Ultragain Digital" revival

I got my hands on one of these Behringer Ultragain Pro-8 Digital a few months ago, as faulty (as in, totally dead) for about 50$ shipped. Having done some preemptive googling before going for it, i was expecting the transformer to be toasted. Sure enough, that's exactly what the problem was - one half of the center-tapped primary measured in the hundreds of kohm, so pretty much open-circuit (as opposed to the 50-odd ohms the remaining good half measured).

Initially i was planning on finding / getting a "drop-in replacement" toroidal transformer, ie. similarly sized physically and power-wise, but with less insanely-high secondary voltages. The stock one, according to some "inspection notes" i found online, seems to have had roughly 2x20VAC windings for the analog +/-15V (meaning the voltage regulators had to "burn off" uselessly much power / voltage), 12VAC for the 5V regulators, and a whopping 58VAC winding for the phantom power regulator. That's about a 50% overkill across the board. One can only wonder just what possessed them to spec the transformer quite like that, especially since it must've been a custom order - you'll rarely find retail units with more than two (identical) secondary windings, and when you do, expect to pay a pretty penny for'em.

#20 SM Pro Audio TB202 power supply repair

<Some sort of continuation from another post>

Buuuuut that brings us to what might as well amount up to the proverbial "elephant in the room" - the power supply. No markings or label anywhere on it - if i didn't know any better, i could almost say it never had any (no adhesive residues or anything). Fortunately, it was held together with four Phillips-head self-tapping screws, so "disrobing" it wasn't unecessarily traumatic. That being said, what greeted my eyes, sort of WAS.

#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).