More MX5050 woes from spacehatch

[spacehatch]

I was tracking drums last night. Albeit I was hitting the tape pretty hard but everything seemed ok. Then I realized I had lost track 8 when it didn't show up on a take. At the end of the previous take the rack tom got wacked rather hard (fortunately at the end of the tune). When listening back to it, the channel peaked pretty seriously than immediately dropped out, as if I had blown the channel up. It sounded like a gate shutting. My signal chain was extremely simple and it was the first thing I checked. Everything up to the Otari's input was ok. I shut the machine off (with tape on it. Is that bad?) Left for a minute and reupped the whole path from scratch. Iseemed to be alright after that. My question. Do these Otaris have some kind of Circut breaker/safety so you can't fry the channel?

 

[kilowatt]

Our MTR-90 just had two channels physically smoke, so my guess would be no, they don't have a safty on the input. Well, they may have some, but not enough.


Its unlikely a microphone and a preamp could have caused what happened. A Studer A-800 can take about +22dB input before it sounds really bad. The Otari is likely around there too.

The problem we had on our Otari had to do with a protools interface sending (don't ask how) 120 volts, ac, into the poor otari's line level inputs. Ouch!

 

[spacehatch]

How very f*&%$# odd!!! Guess what I was sending from into that channel??? You'll never guess. A count off and bar of click from Protools. Wow. If you find out how that happened send something to this thread. Thanks for the response. I was beginning to think nobody cared...
Had another thought. I wonder if it could be a grounding issue due to the swithced hot/cold for the Otari's inputs/outputs? HHHmmmm. That seems unlikely. Also, now the channel that that track was returning to is misbehaving. I don't know about your machine but I had to make cable with the hot /cold switched and ground bridged to cold. I guess it's possible for something like that to happen if I flubbed the solder job. Its been working fine. 120 ac... I'm surprised the thing didn't catch on fire.

 

[kilowatt]

Not only that, the protools interface was connected to some external gear the same day, and that was fried too!

If your power connector is backwards wired, then connecting to a properly wired machine could cause serious problems.

Sometimes electronics just need a good rest though. Has it given you any more trouble?