matta
Well-known member
Hey Guys,
A close friend of mine has a Soundcraft 6000 console (32 channels, 24 busses) that he has had on permanent loan from along mutual friend. It has worked fine for years, a couple scratchy pots, switches, normal wear a tear etc.
The other day he smelt that dreaded burning smell coming from the PSU and the bipolar 17VDC rails went down and the console stopped working (as to be expected).
Off the top of my head I suggest it may be one of 2 things, either the PSU had gone down from wear & tear, bad caps etc or that something in the console is pulling it down.
On closer inspection it seemed that the PSU had been loaded down as one of the secondary windings on the transformer had melted at the molex header and the trace where it connected to the bridge diodes and the connection was blacked and broken/melted through. I desoldered the caps for good measure and checked they were in spec and they are A ok.
I then repaired the PSU by cleaning up the chared remains and jumped the burnt out trace and on power up the PSU came back to life, all the voltages checked out fine and all in spec to the documentation, though with no load.
It made me think that something inside the console is loading down the rails and as expected when it was reattached to the console it did exactly the same thing, the rails seemed to power up and then sagged and are now dead again.
The dilemma is that it isn't his console and the owner doesn't want to sell it, but it clearly needs work and troubleshooting a console isn't going to be fun and as much as I want to help I doubt I can give him more than day of my time to systematically go through it all without having to charge him... which he can't afford right now...
My next course of action would be to repair the PSU AGAIN and then painstakingly look for visually damage on each the PCB's and then if they look okay to slowly plug each channel in until the PSU gets pulled down again and hopefully find the culprit that way... unless anyone with console restoration experience has any other suggestions.
Thanks in advance
Matt
A close friend of mine has a Soundcraft 6000 console (32 channels, 24 busses) that he has had on permanent loan from along mutual friend. It has worked fine for years, a couple scratchy pots, switches, normal wear a tear etc.
The other day he smelt that dreaded burning smell coming from the PSU and the bipolar 17VDC rails went down and the console stopped working (as to be expected).
Off the top of my head I suggest it may be one of 2 things, either the PSU had gone down from wear & tear, bad caps etc or that something in the console is pulling it down.
On closer inspection it seemed that the PSU had been loaded down as one of the secondary windings on the transformer had melted at the molex header and the trace where it connected to the bridge diodes and the connection was blacked and broken/melted through. I desoldered the caps for good measure and checked they were in spec and they are A ok.
I then repaired the PSU by cleaning up the chared remains and jumped the burnt out trace and on power up the PSU came back to life, all the voltages checked out fine and all in spec to the documentation, though with no load.
It made me think that something inside the console is loading down the rails and as expected when it was reattached to the console it did exactly the same thing, the rails seemed to power up and then sagged and are now dead again.
The dilemma is that it isn't his console and the owner doesn't want to sell it, but it clearly needs work and troubleshooting a console isn't going to be fun and as much as I want to help I doubt I can give him more than day of my time to systematically go through it all without having to charge him... which he can't afford right now...
My next course of action would be to repair the PSU AGAIN and then painstakingly look for visually damage on each the PCB's and then if they look okay to slowly plug each channel in until the PSU gets pulled down again and hopefully find the culprit that way... unless anyone with console restoration experience has any other suggestions.
Thanks in advance
Matt