Consumer electronics "war stories"

On Saturday, December 5, 2015 at 2:44:26 PM UTC-5, Jon Elson wrote in rec.crafts.metalworking:

Yeah, obviously a current relay or just that kind of an interface or something. Tell 'em about it, so they can buy you a whole new one.

You can't get anything if you stay silent. (I learned that the hard way)

For a very short time in the 1980s, Kenwood manufactured amplifiers with wrong value resistors at various locations. The first one was a bear because I had never seen a Japanese company make that kind of mistake.

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In a similar vein to your remote story, we sold an $1800 Tandberg cassette deck that came to the shop over and over again for not responding to the transport keys. In the shop it always worked perfectly. I decided to go to the customer's house after work to see what the problem was. At his house, the keys didn't work. I spotted a light dimmer on the wall. Turning it off and the deck worked perfectly.

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I haven't bothered to write anything new, but in 1994, I scribbled this list for Wired Magazine, which never bothered to print it or pay me: I'm not sure I could call these success stories, but since I got paid for most of the repairs, I guess it qualifies as successful.

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And what was the charge for that?

$1 for resetting the switch and $9,999.00 for knowing which one?

Jamie

While I was in a neighborhood visiting a nice looking girl, a friend of hers ask if I could go over to their place and see why their portable color TV near the door had messed up colors they could not remove.

I really didn't want to go and told them it would be a minimum of $20 bucks just to walk in, they accepted.

So I walked in and didn't even bother to turn the TV on. I reached up on top of the TV set and removed the 9x6 Triaxal Speaker with a large magnet on it, sitting there for what ever reason, I have no idea why.

I held my hand out for the money! They asked aren't you going to even turn it on? I said, you can do that, they did and could not believe what they saw. I took the money and said, have a good day now..

Jamie

** Need more explanation for that one.

.... Phil

Heh, anyone else reading this, before you toss it, check ebay for the completed listings on both working and non-working audio stuff from the

70's and 80's, it's nuts.

Even if that 828 was broke, it seems to fetch $100-$150 and the working ones $200 on up.

Some of the top of the line ones from back then (pio sx-1980, sansui 5500 i think) in the thousands. This isn't the old tube stuff like Fisher and Marantz, just the popular solid state crap from the 70's and 80's.

The power amps and speakers don't follow but anything with receivers and turntables from that period, you probably can make back what you paid for it new, and then some.

-bruce snipped-for-privacy@ripco.com

You can get them cheaper if you get lucky. Some of those three day auctions on eBay n shit. But there is quite a number of people who appreciate that old stuff. Like me, I see no reason my amplifier needs wifi. I knew we were going downhill when I saw an amp with an RJ-45. And to me, this new stuff mostly sounds like shit.

And I don't like the idea of 12 balsa wood speakers the quality of a 1966 t able radio and one woofer. Stereo was invented because we got two ears. I m ight even tolerate quad, but 7.1 ? Nope. I have a hard enough time understa nding the words in stereo and on TV I usually switch it to mono.

Anyway, the prices of some of this stuff are outrageous. A Marantz like my old one, $700. Look up the price of a Marantz 2385. A Pioneer SX-1980. (not sure but I think that was the most powerful receiver ever built) Recently a turntable went for $55,000. What's more I talked to my buddy and mentione d that and he told me they go higher, up into six figures.

And now, down in Sydney, Australia, Elton John was spotted in a record stor e buying albums. The guy can afford anything he wants but he wants a record player. (and logically, records of course)

There is quite the renewed interest in vinyl these days. Even youngins. Guy s on AK for example talking about how they just got their teenager a turnta ble and an old vintage system. Sometimes for their college dorm if that is where they live, other times wherever.

In fact right now we are setting up something of a lab for this stuff. Dist ortion tester, standards to calibrate everything for power output measureme nts, and more to come. The idea here is to be sure the stuff is working rig ht because when it is 40 years old it can have insidious problems that only distort a little and won't be noticed right away. And when you get them ru nning really right, that old 1970s shit blows most of the new shit away.

Don't get me wrong, there is a high end still but if you think about 1979 d ollars and a receiver is $400, how much would that be today ? Well, it IS. The same relative level of quality easily costs four times the money. What you get for $400 is like what you got for $79 back then, although THAT qual ity is a bit better.

Just not that much. Not enough for me.

I don't use it, but I got a Pioneer SX-850. No lid, no bottom, glass in fro nt broke, tuning shaft bent. Power suppl.y board was broke in three places, needed work on that, one channel of the power amp and the preamp as well ! It works. It is a rag. It is filthy but everything works.

Not for sale.

Well I guess it is my turn.

NAP bigscreen no sound - vertical control IC.

Everything runs off the data and clock lines. This IC does the "S" correcti on and things like that pertaining to linearity. It is of course bus addres sed. The one line, data or clock, doesn't matter, was clamping the signal d own to like 2 volts. Leaky. That meant the data from the EPROM was not read when the unit got initialized so it did not know which sound system it had and never upped that.

Sony 32" loses green and blue - adjust vertical height.

This was an interesting comedy of failure mode. Apparently when they came o ut with AKB a had to be done to the CRT aperture grill frame. It reflected too much. The CRT had just been replaced. The way I figure it they used a d ud from a non-AKB set. When the pulses feeding the cathodes to detect the c urrent got to the frame they reflected like all hell and told the circuit t here was too much green, and then blue as the circuit drifted a bit and bro ught the lines over the metal. I found this out with the scope. I mean, the re is no green but it is getting alot of green feedback. WTF !

And THEN, to adjust the vertical you use a service menu. Guess what color t he numbers and letters are in that menu. They were not red but if you left the set on for a while all you had was red.

I got some good ones about cars too.

The light dimmer was putting an enormous amount of hash on the mains; somehow it was getting into the microprocessor circuitry. I had seen this before on much cheaper items so I had a hunch that this was the problem.

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I almost want to say it was a fault, but it may have been the design. Reall y, when you talk old stuff, some things just did not exist back then. Thing s that cause more interference.

When working on older equipment, much older, I had to learn not to expect t oo much.

In that case with the Tandberg I would have gotten some line filtering. the y make those all put together units you can put right at the AC input, ligh t enough so you can cut the cord even and just glue them about anywhere, ju st make sure they are as close to the AC inlet as possible.

To figure it all out we woukld need the print for that Tandberg. I remember working on one R2R deck that had no microprocessor. It was all gates and c omparators and all that. I think it was a 9200 ??? So that one probably wou ld have been alright, no keyboard scanning or any of that, just a bunch of switches and flipflops and gates. and then the solenoid and relay drivers, oh and the current drivers for the eddy current motors.

Simple, I liked it. I fixed it. It got sold. It got damaged in shipping. We got f***ed. I wish I would have kept it but really, I have no tapes.

** Wall dimmers put large voltage spikes on the wiring going to the lamp/s concerned - two spikes per cycle at up to the peak AC voltage. This radiates as buzzing noise across the audio and also AM radio bands.

Well shielded, low impedance gear is not affected but anything high impedance and not well shielded picks it up. Electric guitars and some keyboards are particularly susceptible.

Seems your Tandberg was too and that is piss poor design.

.... Phil

Good fun. Thanks for posting that.

Number 10 reminded me of this:

My first-ever call out to a Unix system was to this very message.

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There's another possibility: knob/tube wiring puts those spikes on distant HOT and NEUTRAL wires (not a close-spaced pair). So, there can be significant magnetic induction, and that can mess up low impedance circuitry. It used to be seen a lot in CRT television pictures as deflection jitter.

You have to worry about low impedance, too (balanced pair helps).

Phil, Did you ever see the Tandberg cd player (1987) that cost over $1000.00 U.S. that had a plastic Philips chassis that never functioned correctly even when new? I was upset when I bought a Philips with the same chassis for $125.00 and had to return it. Imagine the flack we got when selling this turd.

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Was that the type with the CD cartridge, like a trunked automotive unit? Those things were all such garbage.

Ah, we had a couple of those. We had a fairly large 360 system at Washington University. 1401 and 7094, then 360/50 and then 360/65.

One of the routines that made one think of CIA dead drops in the middle of the night was the routine for printing paychecks. (I guess vendor checks were similar, too.) They had the box of continuous form checks locked in a bank vault in the basement of the administration building. The box was taped shut with signatures across the seal. When they opened the box, two people had to be present and they had to sign a log sheet with the serial number of the top check. They carried the box to the computer center, loaded it into the printer and the program printed a sample form with VOID-- VOID--VOID all across it, but other info in the right place so they could align the forms. When all was OK, they told the program to print the checks. Then, they had to fill out and sign the log sheet reporting which forms serial # were used in the aligning process and the first and last forms serial # of the printed check run. Then the whole process was reversed to get the box sealed and locked into the vault. During the whole process, nobody was ever supposed to leave the side of the printer.

Well, imagine the confusion when in the middle of the print run the printer started sparking and set the continuous forms checks on fire! I heard about this 2nd hand, but apparently the accounting guys were running around like decapitated chickens! They didn't even know how to properly log what had happened.

I'm pretty sure we had another paper on fire event, but it was just standard print output that time.

Jon

No. It was a 5 disc carousel. Kenwood didn't have a design in the pipeline so they outsourced it.

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