I maintained one for about 6 years after purchased new. The engineers liked it for the mic pres, but not as happy about the EQ.
It had issues in my opinion:
There was one chip on each channel that was the "gateway" solid state "relay" to the stereo buss. It blew often- SSM2036 if memory serves, and the stereo buss would be polluted with hash noise no matter what. The only way to find the bad channel was to go for bus (see John R., I pay attention!) ribbon jumpers and isolate groups of modules, then pull modules from the bad group until the bad module was removed. Not good for a studio without a tech on staff!
I started losing caps around year 5 which was way too early! Many caps along the circuit path and not the same caps on each channel. I think it was cheap caps.
The circuit boards were made on the cheap! Thin traces and flux all over the place.
And, there were many EC's engineering changes made after the production run was done, so there were re-tracking wires all over.
The master section was a mess, with all the daughter cards and flux and EC wires all over the place.
Keeping this console going requires good technical skills. Be warned.
Mike
