Hehhehhe...there is a very fine line between bravery and stupidity...
So when is the official smoke check?
Dunno AK...really busy week, but I've done the pre smoke check:
I did what I indicated I planned on doing...
- inspected the motherboard traces and solder joints with a reading glass and good light...there are some scratches in some spots since the mixer has been missing some of its bottom cover for who knows how long, but none of the scratches go through any traces; down to the copper in a couple spots though. Found a couple stray solder blobs from the the heavy soldering that was done to weld the 0V wire braids to the pads so I got those off.
- Inspected the card slots, again with a reading glass and good light. Overall they look really clean...this further reinforces my idea that, though the mixer looks abused and dirty, that is more from poor storage and handling...I don't think it has been operated much. Anyway, like I said, the slots looked pretty clean...A tiny bit of shiny dust in each so I blew that out with compressed air.
- Tested resistance between each rail circuit and ground/each 0V rail to make sure there was no shorting and all looked good.
- Connected the power umbilical up to the PSU and made sure that each pin was outputting the right thing and that looked good.
- Finally, hooked the whole mess up to the empty frame and hit "POWER". No smoke, no drama at all. I sense this thing wants to work.
- Tested each rail at each slot to confirm everything is getting to where its supposed to go. Again, all looks good.
Next step is indeed to take a channel strip, plug it in and hit the power button. I will use dementedchord's "Idiot Light", which I did for this last test and it is nifty. The light bulb lights for a split second when I first turn on the PSU and then goes dark. I watch that to make sure it stays dark. If it lights I know there's trouble and I also know that, by virtue of the bulb lighting, that it is taking the hit...very nifty indeed.
Assuming that the channel strip test comes out okay (i.e. no smoke or fire), there are some things I'm really curious about, mainly the eq. I'm curious if the hi and low swept bands are shelving or peaking. To test that I'll run pink noise into one of the line inputs and then feed the direct out to an analyzer. I know there is some way to look at the components in the signal path to see if it is shelving or peaking, but that is beyond me
Also really curious about some of the monitor routing and mute and solo functions since there's like 6 different mute/solo buttons...also the whole REMOTE buss thingy, but that's all going to have to wait until I get the Control Module put back together. Again, the REMOTE thingy...if that does what I think it does, it is super cool...it would instantly turn any channel strip into a group fader for any or all mic, line1, line2 inputs. Why is that important? Well, obviously the mixer has only 12 channel strips, but at the push of a switch one strip can become a group master for, say, tape returns. You'd have to mix with the trim knobs, but still it gives you single-strip control of those inputs, and you can access any two input types at a time since there are two REMOTE busses, A & B.
Okay, okay. One thing at a time...need to see if even one strip
works first. Yeah.
Maybe someone can clue me in to some info.
