#60 MOTU 8M teardown

Well, this one's a "biggie" - i had been lusting after one of these for a few years now, but the price was (and technically still is) on the prohibitive side, retailing at ~$1300-1500, depending where you look. Fortunately though, i've been stalking eBay off and on for one of these, and a used one happened to pop up just the other week, on auction. To my amazement and delight, despite there being at least 6 other "watchers", i was fortunate enough to win it for the opening bid, ie. about half the price of a new one.

#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.

#54 Recycled backlight LED strip ambient lighting

What with winter drawing closer, and the days (as in daylight) getting shorter up here in the north, one tends to need to turn on the lights more and earlier than in summertime. And since i'm the gathering type, i figured it's about time i put some previously collected materials to (good?) use.

#52 Solar A2.7 & Fishman Fluence Keith Merrow, part two

Aaaaand it's back! Not because of technical issues though. Due to chance, and the limited speed of international shipping, only the day after the owner got his guitar back, did the Fishman rechargeable battery-pack get delivered, just only too late to include it in the previous operation. But no matter, this should be far less involved than that.

#50 Philips HTS7201 Soundhub Home Theater (2.1) teardown & repair

This just came in, with the symptom description of "will no longer turn on". Fair enough, sounds like a power supply issue then. Apparently this retailed around $400-ish when new (according to a 2012 review i found online) - not exactly bottom-of-the-barrel, but it's still very much in the mainstream/consumer range, so i'm expecting crap caps to be the root cause. But time will tell.

#44 Ram Audio S6000 teardown & repair (rebranded as LD Systems SP 6K)

A good buddy and neighbour of mine had one of his amps kick the bucket in the middle of a gig (one i was helping out on, as well). On the bright side, noone noticed, only when turning-off time came. The beast in question was one of his two LD Systems SP 6K amps (rebadged Ram Audio S6000).

#37 Presonus Audiobox 1818VSL teardown and troubleshooting (part 1)

Together with the pair of Konnekt x32's (one of which is dealt with in the previous write-up here), i also got one of these Presonus Audiobox 1818VSL's. Also sold as untested, but powered up and allegedly detected by a Mac, so i figured it couldn't have been too far gone (or fubar'd).

The reality of it turned out to be a wee bit more complicated than one might've hoped...

#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?

#28 Active full-range surround speaker project (BN96-12832 & TPA3118)

Since the "unofficial" theme of this blog seems to be repair, recycling and repurposing (more or less), i finally got around to getting knee-deep into this idea, which i started devising quite a while ago - a pair of "slimline" surround speakers.

Disclaimers:
 - No, these are not meant (or supposed) to be "hi-fi". More just for a bit of "ambient noise", if you will, for movies with 5.1 soundtracks. That, and possibly alternative monitoring for checking mixes.
 - No, these are not meant to go terribly loud. Due to, let's call them, physical constraints, they'll be placed at the corners of my sofa (right up against the wall, opposite the TV and the "mains"), so no huge SPL's are required.

#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.

#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.