Saturday, September 03, 2011

Dug out the bench today, in hopes of getting a little work done.

The contents of this pan were strewn over the bench. You could say my junk box situation is a bit unruly at this point in time.

First tier of the actual progress pile is working through the Ramsa 8210 and freeing up even more space on the bench while also paving the way to record.

Each of the channel strips has been marked with its position in the frame, which I find odd, seeing as how the channel strips are presumably all identical, and actual channel number is a function of physical placement in the console. I doubt this mark is stock, and I take it to be a sign that someone has been inside this thing in the past.

Doing some fairly drastic work, from the look of things...

Cut traces and jumpers, I haven't really done a huge amount of research and/or reverse engineering on this yet. I'm toying with the idea of reverting two of the ten channels back to stock for comparative analyses, since eight direct outputs will mate with the recorder.

Then again, perhaps I'll just recap and reassemble for brevity sake. I will ponder what it would take to return a channel to stock before making a decision. I have decided to leave the (groan) RCA connectors alone at the rear. Since the Otari is technically unbalanced, I'm not losing anything with the form of the plug. My plan is to loom up RCA direct out/return and XLR pin 3 hot unbalanced snakes to a latching hard wired 1/4" patch bay, which will allow a no fuss interface to the rest of world and keep the weirdo connectors intact.

I only got one channel recapped, after preparing the bench. Though another channel has been torn down, and is ready for more caps (tomorrow).

Side by side comparison of the new and old. I'm loading it with Nichicon KW series, purportedly audio grade caps and inexpensive. Each channel carries 7x 47uf @ 6.3v (upgraded to 25v); 2x 10uf @ 25v (upgraded to 100v); 3x 10uf @ 63v (upgraded to 100v); 1x 330uf @ 6.3v; 1x 100uf @ 6.3v (upgraded to 25v); 1x 33uf @ 25v (upgraded to 35v) and 1x 4.7 @ 25v (upgraded to 50v).

Rest assured, I will be bolting these channels down out of the sequence printed on their frames, just because I can.

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