Studer A807 - general gloating and some questions

  • Thread starter Thread starter jpmorris
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sweetbeats said:
Watched that video...MAN the transport is responive on that thing...I can't believe how quick the brakes haul the reels down from fast wind to play...maybe the brakes aren't adjusted right on my 58...if I'm in fast wind and I hit STOP or PLAY, at least 30 ~ 40 seconds of counter time goes by before it comes to a full stop.

And the tension arm on the Studer...not so much as a wiggle in PLAY. Smooooth. Wow.

Nice looking deck too. Studers have a nice look. Me likey da look.
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Studers have great transports, no doubt. My friend Charles Olson has a bunch of Studers, some at home and some where he works. One interesting observation from him is that, in his experience, Studers don't sound interesting the way Ampex, MCI and 3M do. More like digital. FWIW. Good luck on the rebuild!

Cheers,

Otto
 
After setting the bias, here's the result when I mixed the full song down:



I'm still a little concerned about the level inequality between the channels, so I'm not quite sure I want to use it to mix a whole album down quite yet. I suspect the repro head preamplifier.

It turns out this machine has an audio control card made by BAUCH instead of the normal Studer one. It is supposed to be higher quality than the original, but I don't have schematics for it - and I think it is the board containing the preamps.
 
(Repost owing to database corruption)
Well, it took me long enough to get there, but I finally managed to fix the problem. It seems that most of the electrolytics in the playback signal path on one audio card were drying out - in many cases they were about half their rated value. Bizarrely the rest of them, on the other board and in the record section on this board were far better off, around 10% down (the machine will soon be 21 so I guess that's not bad!)

So, having isolated the one board as the culprit, I sat down and recapped the playback circuit until I ran out of 47uF capacitors. Not especially scientific I guess, but it solved the problem - both channels are now roughly equivalent when set to 88/255 - originally one had to be set to 200/255 which increased the noise dramatically.
At some stage I'll have to get some more parts and finish the job but for now it's working a whole lot better.
 
I had a question here too yesterday. What is the stereo expander you mentioned in the above post. I noticed the A807 version sounds quite a bit better than the original version.
 
SteveM said:
I had a question here too yesterday. What is the stereo expander you mentioned in the above post. I noticed the A807 version sounds quite a bit better than the original version.
Click to expand...

I use an SPL Vitalizer Jack. One of the times I've bought something completely unheard and found it did exactly what I'd imagined it would.
 
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