#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...

#41 Focusrite Scarlett 18i20 (1st gen) teardown & repair(?)

A local friend bought this slightly battle-scarred Focusrite Scarlett 18i20 off a buddy of his. The reported issue was some random / intermittent noise affecting only the inputs. Time will tell if that was conveyed to me accurately, or if it's a more global issue. First thing's first though - having a wee little look-see on the inside.

#39 M-Audio Profire 2626 teardown and repair

Ebay strikes again - this time, a pretty damn cheap (to acquire) M-Audio Profire 2626 Firewire audio interface. I maintain it's still the cheapest way, to this day, to get 24 inputs and outputs to and from a computer. Most other 1U (rackmount) interfaces will give you 8 mic preamps but only one bank of ADAT. The ones with two sets of ADAT I/O will cost you a pretty penny, though.

Either way, this was sold as "not detected by the computer", so my bet's on the Firewire chip being toast, "as usual". Can you see a pattern emerging here?

#27 Samsung 5V 1A ETA0U81EBE USB travel charger

This one's a quickie, but i figured i might as well document it.

A friend passed me this a few weeks ago, not quite sure why. I don't recall it being mentioned as dead, only not-used. Either way, last night i wanted to charge the battery inside my modded M-Audio Fast Track, in preparation for a local gig next week. Upon plugging it into this thing, the power LED flashed up for an instant, then nothing. I figured it might not like the USB data lines being tied together, as they often are, in chargers; it powered on and worked well with another charger. But that prompted me to crack this one open.

#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.

#15 Alesis io|26 repair & modding

So, i got my hands on one of these Alesis io|26 interfaces for pretty cheap (50 bucks delivered). "Of course", i bought it as faulty (can you see a pattern yet?), with the already "classic" issue of dead Firewire chip (the ubiquitous Texas Instruments TSB41AB2).

I went for it mainly for two reasons. First, because i knew it was based on the TC Applied Technologies Dice II chip, and as such, should have flexible enough mixing / routing options; second, due to the ADAT inputs available. The sort of "added bonus", one might say, were the gain adjustments for the 8 analog (mic/line) inputs.

#5 Another Li-ion Upgrade - Cordless Trimmer

Due to my openly-admitted laziness, a while back i got myself a trimmer - it's way quicker and easier than a full shave, and i rarely need (or want, for that matter) to be totally clean shaven. But that's enough background babbling, on to the nitty-gritty. This one's mainly "what for increasing the chooch factor", as it were - thank you AvE, you crazy canuck.