Analog Studio Mixing Board Question

S

Shoulderpain

New member
I found this at a yard sale this morning. I was wondering if this can or should be incorporated into my digital home studio plans. If I plug my guitars and mics into this, can I get it to cooperate with my computer without spending a lot of money? Can I convert analog to digital with this? And is it worth it? Do I have a great find here or a very heavy albatross?

Thanks. :) The pictures are here: https://homerecording.com/bbs/showthread.php?t=269199
 
What a cool find. Someone who mentioned it looked like an old broadcast board was exactly right. I remember seeing consoles like this at my father's TV station when I was a kid. Most of those were TEAC boards that had pretty good mic pre's in them - but understand that this board was probably not designed to do much other than amplify and mix voices for radio and/or television broadcast. Can't say if it would do any good as a direct box, etc.

It won't convert analog to digital, of course - digital wasn't in the broadcast vocabulary when this thing was made. But you could use the preamps in it (if you can get it working, that is) as a front-end to an A/D converter.

From what I remember of these units, they had notoriously noisy pots, so you might want to have a AV repair shop have a look at it and clean the pans, eqs, sends, faders, etc. and check the signal flow of the preamps.
 
Take it in to a shop and have them look it over. Make sure all the internal connections are intact, check out the pre amps, and the VU meters. Then have them clean it. Lastly, hook things up and make sure you have a complete signal channel including the busses and aux's.

That's a really nice find if everything is still working. I noticed that your stereo outs are XLR. :cool:
 
Thanks and thanks

I really appreciate the insight.

That it is a broadcast console is really interesting.

It does have the word TEAC in each of the displays.

I am fascinated at the idea of having pre amps that I can put ahead of the a/d converter.
 
In 99.9999% of all recording situations, the right pre amp will make all the difference. What you are looking for are pre amps that will give you the desired volume without a huge noise floor. All amplifiers have some noise, so what you are looking for are ones that have a lower signal to noise ratio. You will know as soon as you crank up the gain. Bad ones will hiss as they get turned up.

Good luck with your find. I hope it brings you success.

Here is a link you may find interesting:

Millenium Broadcasting Console
 
Rokket that was inspiring!

Do you know how much, even by way of the ballpark, it would cost to get something like this serviced in the manner you described by an A-V shop?
 
I think a lot of it depends on what needs to be done with it. I don't imagine just getting it inspected would cost too much. Your best bet is to canvas and see what they charge. Most of the cost (hopefully) will be labor. I haven't had to service any of my stuff (most of it is fairly new compared to yours), so I don't really know. Sorry.
 
I had a alesis 16 channel analog mixer in my signal chain but I used it for outs and not ins, but if I wanted to I could've routed it to go in from it. So basically I'm sure you could to an extent it just depends on the way you would try and use it
 
Shoulderpain said:
I really appreciate your advice.

I'm in LA so there should be some people who can still work on these. :)
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I am in San Diego. There used to be all kinds of shops and music stores around, now they have all gone north. There is still a Guitar Center around here, but who wants to go through that?
 
Rokket said:
What you are looking for are pre amps that will give you the desired volume without a huge noise floor. All amplifiers have some noise, so what you are looking for are ones that have a lower signal to noise ratio.
Click to expand...



probably just a brain fart but you got that backwards... you want a high ratio of signal to noise... absurd example??? a ratio of 2-1 is a lower ratio than 5-1... right??? or am i the one with the brain fart???
 
Well, here's my reaction. How good are you with a soldering iron and multimeter? Because almost certainly, it will need some attention somewhere. You don't have a power supply, and that connector has many pins, so it probably has multiple voltages (+/-15V, 48V, 1.5V, probably more; just guesses there).

Constructing a power supply is possible, but a significant project. Without the service manual or a schematic, it's going to be tough. So your first project is finding a service manual.

But before that, I would open the console and see what a channel strip looks like. If it uses 1980 vintage IC opamps, I wouldn't bother; for the time and expensive you could buy a good modern IC mixer like an A&H and come out way ahead. Put it up on eBay and put the proceeds towards a functional unit.

If the channel strips are discrete, it might be worth salvaging. If the mixer otherwise needs work, it might be worth pulling the channel strips and racking them individually (replace the faders with a pot).

Another fun project might be to strip the VU meters and build a meter bridge for whatever else you end up with.

As far as taking it to a shop, some shops will have a minimum bench charge for simply opening the thing up. That could be $100 or so. But maybe you'll find some old tech nostalgic for this bit of gear that would help you out.
 
Shoulderpain,
I took a look at the new pictures you posted recently. I'm retracting my assumption that this was an old radio/broadcast console... you've got buss assignments and options for inline monitoring - none of the old broadcast consoles I've seen or worked on had anything like that. The layout looks broadcast, but the types of routing options say recording.

Also noticed that all of the numbers in the meter bridge match... any luck Googling the numbers along with TEAC references to see if that leads you back to a model???
 
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