#58 Behringer FirePower FCA1616 teardown

Long time no see, eh? Well, what can you do when the new job's kicking you in the rear end? Regardless, new patient on the table this time around - A not-that-often-encountered Behringer audio interface (now discontinued, "obviously"). I took the gamble on it primarily because it was cheap, secondly because i wanted to take a peek under the hood, and somewhat connected to that, curious about if and what "magic mojo" might the touted Midas preamps contain.

#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...

#55 Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 (1st gen) teardown & modding

I had fiddled with one of these a couple years back, but here's another chance to take a look inside a (1st gen) Focusrite Scarlett 2i2, their second-smallest USB audio interface of the range.

#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.

#53 JMicron JM20330-based mSATA to ZIF-ATA adapter power modding

A few years ago, in the quest for more storage space, power saving, weight reduction and eliminating sensitivity to shock, i decided to upgrade my old iPod Video (5.5G) from the stock 80GB hard-drive to a 256GB SSD, with the aid of an mSATA to ZIF-ATA adapter, and some mods to the "aftermarket" Rockbox firmware.

... Except that recently, for whatever reason, it's been kinda flaky, and ended up giving up altogether. To aid with stability, i had also performed some hardware mods on the power supply side of things (as well as on the iPod's mainboard). The rationale behind that, at least in part, was the source of the above-mentioned mods, so i'll need to transplant those to this newer one as well.

#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.

#51 Solar A2.7 & Fishman Fluence Keith Merrow & 5-way install

Local guitarist buddy time again (owner of the Fortin Grind and the Warwick bass amp featured here previously) - after taking several swings at it, he got fed up and let me have a go at installing a brand new set of Fishman Fluence Keith Merrow pickups into his Solar A2.7 guitar. Complete with some custom switching and whatnot, to take full advantage of the entire feature set the pickups offer.

#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.

#49 Joyo ZoMBie, part two - analysis and repair

It took the best part of an evening and a couple hours the next day, but i managed to lift the schematic for the whole preamp board. I also recreated the board, but that was mostly for sanity-checking. I used all the same component designators, but didn't bother measuring all the dozens of small ceramic caps, because there's only SO far i'm willing to go...