frederic
New member
Aside from finishing, and installing the patch bay doghouse , I started trying to boot all my gear after wiping off what seemed like several inches of dust 
So after wiping things clean, I mounted the akai HD recorders into their under-console table rack, and booted them. NONE of them could see the hard drives mounted in the external hot swap enclosure I put together. After some playing with the menus, being that they all have the same problem, I concluded it had to be the homemade drive unit. So I crawled around back - sure enough, there's the problem. No SCSI cables. I dig through box after box after box, and no SCSI cables that would fit. (insert loud swearing). So, now I've started a list of things I have to buy. I could have sworn I bought these cables already, but maybe not. Okay, no problem, I'll work on something else.
Mounted my 32-port wordclock buffer into the doghouse after mounting a new power jack on the front panel, and started wiring it to all the digital gear with a wordclock input. Spent a few hours doing that, trying to keep the cabling neat so I can crawl back there without knocking everything out, and powered up the wordclock generator, plugged in the 32-port buffer, and I hear a pop sound and the power LED on my homemade unit never lit. Of course all my digital gear is now blinking, or screaming "external wordclock not found".
So I disconnect all the wiring off the buffer, and plug one of them directly into the wordclock generator (aardvark Gen x6), and the device I plugged in stopped whining. Good, I didn't blow up the Aardvark at least. So I unload my 32-port wordclock buffer out of the rack, and take the cover off. Every TTL chip on the motherboard was nothing more than 14 pins with melted, blown up black crud between them. Okay, this is very annoying. I double checked my wiring of the new power jack and it was correct. Okay. Wonder why it blew up. I put a voltmeter across the output of the wall wart, 113V DC. No, that can't be. I check again. 113V DC. I pulled it out of the outlet to read the face, and it's supposed to be 12V DC @ 1A. It's a switching power supply type wall wart, not the usual "I'll get hot and cook myself" transformer based wall wart. I plug it in and measure it again, 113V DC. WTF? Apparently the switching power supply circuit inside short circuited, and took my 32-port wordclock buffer with it. Nice. It did work at one point. Oh well. (insert more loud swearing and some banging of my head on the floor).
So I yank all that stuff out, remove all the wiring, and put it all in a cardboard box. Then I dig in the basement for my box of cable TV leftovers, from a couple of cable TV jobs I did for friends. I find myself 6 two-port coax splitters, and a huge pile of 3' F-style coax cables. Dig in another box and find piles of gold plated F-connector to BNC adapters. I'm going to make this work
Since the Aardvark has 6 outputs, and I have 11 pieces of digital gear that requires wordclock (at the front of the room) and one unit (Korg Triton) at the back of the room, I hook up all the splitters and adapters, run the wires again, and boot everything simultaniously with the power switch.
Viola, everything finds wordclock, and is now syncronized. Yay, something worked without introducing smoke into my studio's air. I started wiring the six TMD1000's mixers together in daisy chain fashion as I had before I moved here, to the TMD4000 main mixer. Everything is fine, except I cannot find two of the TMD1000 power supplies. I was missing three but I found one in the garage. I'd hate to think the other two are in the garage, I can barely walk in my 2 car garage anymore, I've squirrelled away a ton of car parts to sell on e-bay to help offset the cost of my studio. I guess it's time to start digging.
Well, 2/3 of my console table lights up, finds wordclock, and talks to one another. At least that's progress.
So after wiping things clean, I mounted the akai HD recorders into their under-console table rack, and booted them. NONE of them could see the hard drives mounted in the external hot swap enclosure I put together. After some playing with the menus, being that they all have the same problem, I concluded it had to be the homemade drive unit. So I crawled around back - sure enough, there's the problem. No SCSI cables. I dig through box after box after box, and no SCSI cables that would fit. (insert loud swearing). So, now I've started a list of things I have to buy. I could have sworn I bought these cables already, but maybe not. Okay, no problem, I'll work on something else.
Mounted my 32-port wordclock buffer into the doghouse after mounting a new power jack on the front panel, and started wiring it to all the digital gear with a wordclock input. Spent a few hours doing that, trying to keep the cabling neat so I can crawl back there without knocking everything out, and powered up the wordclock generator, plugged in the 32-port buffer, and I hear a pop sound and the power LED on my homemade unit never lit. Of course all my digital gear is now blinking, or screaming "external wordclock not found".
So I disconnect all the wiring off the buffer, and plug one of them directly into the wordclock generator (aardvark Gen x6), and the device I plugged in stopped whining. Good, I didn't blow up the Aardvark at least. So I unload my 32-port wordclock buffer out of the rack, and take the cover off. Every TTL chip on the motherboard was nothing more than 14 pins with melted, blown up black crud between them. Okay, this is very annoying. I double checked my wiring of the new power jack and it was correct. Okay. Wonder why it blew up. I put a voltmeter across the output of the wall wart, 113V DC. No, that can't be. I check again. 113V DC. I pulled it out of the outlet to read the face, and it's supposed to be 12V DC @ 1A. It's a switching power supply type wall wart, not the usual "I'll get hot and cook myself" transformer based wall wart. I plug it in and measure it again, 113V DC. WTF? Apparently the switching power supply circuit inside short circuited, and took my 32-port wordclock buffer with it. Nice. It did work at one point. Oh well. (insert more loud swearing and some banging of my head on the floor).
So I yank all that stuff out, remove all the wiring, and put it all in a cardboard box. Then I dig in the basement for my box of cable TV leftovers, from a couple of cable TV jobs I did for friends. I find myself 6 two-port coax splitters, and a huge pile of 3' F-style coax cables. Dig in another box and find piles of gold plated F-connector to BNC adapters. I'm going to make this work
Since the Aardvark has 6 outputs, and I have 11 pieces of digital gear that requires wordclock (at the front of the room) and one unit (Korg Triton) at the back of the room, I hook up all the splitters and adapters, run the wires again, and boot everything simultaniously with the power switch.Viola, everything finds wordclock, and is now syncronized. Yay, something worked without introducing smoke into my studio's air. I started wiring the six TMD1000's mixers together in daisy chain fashion as I had before I moved here, to the TMD4000 main mixer. Everything is fine, except I cannot find two of the TMD1000 power supplies. I was missing three but I found one in the garage. I'd hate to think the other two are in the garage, I can barely walk in my 2 car garage anymore, I've squirrelled away a ton of car parts to sell on e-bay to help offset the cost of my studio. I guess it's time to start digging.
Well, 2/3 of my console table lights up, finds wordclock, and talks to one another. At least that's progress.
