OK, don't get all wierded out. (You're pretty quick at jumping back without info yourself - something about cajones.) It is based on my INFORMED analysis. I'm aware of the fact that it's solid state circuitry, having a potentiometer fan speed control, just like most computer power supplies. It is a clear cut circuit used for bling - nothing else.
What I'm telling you is based on the fact that I'm a retired electronics engineer. I've designed quite a few power supplies being used today in satellites constructed at UCBerkeley. I'm not just giving you some bull carp. I know what I'm talking about in this arena. I worked 18 years, off and on, as a rocket scientist at Space Sciences Lab at UCBerkeley.
Oh yeah, duct tape would solve this major dilemna very well.
Hey iggy8n, it appears we share many things in common from the past... car engine mods, music, electronics. When I was in high school, one of my hobbies was electronics... specifically assembling AC/DC Converters (I still know the diagram for both half and full wave rectifiers), AM/FM tuners, amplifiers, etc. This hobby came to be as I was into music and could barely afford to buy the Kenwoods, Sansui's, Pioneers (Magnavox and Zenith were already on the decline at the time) of the day so I did the next best thing... build my own. I even learned to etch the circuit for pre and power amps on PCBs using masking tape on the board (or a marker) and ferric-chloride solution. I am still hoping I did not do any lasting damage from inhaling all those fumes from the solution and the soldering lead which I later found out were not good for you.
Jaysaul, even heathkits were too expensive for me back then but I did read a lot about Heathkit radio controlled cars powered by gas engines with servo motors controlling the gas and throttle... just a fantasy in my eyes way back then. I forgot to mention I also built speakers... much easier than building amps. For the simple 2 way speaker (with a cone, dome, or horn tweeter and 6.5" woofer) the crossover can just be a 4 microfarad unpolarized capacitor... adding a choke and some resistors for a more sophisticated one.
Nowadays almost no one builds/assembles/repairs electronics anymore... its too bad. People just throw away things and buy cheap new stuff. Maybe when the price of rare earth (neodymium for example was used in higher end speakers though probably not anymore) becomes too high because it is becoming more difficult to find and mine these, people will be forced to recycle / repair electronics once again.
My Dad gave me my first Heathkit, it was like an electronic erector set. It was a peg board with resistors and capacitors and transistors and relays and lights and things I have forgotten. At the end of each component was a short spring that let you easily attach wires. It came with a book that showed you how to make all kinds of electric devices. It lasted longer than my chemistry sets, which I usually melted, blew up and gassed myself with in a few days. That was probably when I was about 10. When I was about 13 I built two Heathkit Walkie Talkies. When I was in my late twenties I built a Heathkit 32" TV. That was a real project! Nowadays kids play with code. The incessant evolution of communication is making more and more parts converge and become so small you can't play with them. Sooner or later (sooner for me) we all get left in the dust, then we become one with the dust and blow away our own selves.
OK Knuckle, I just thought you were asking the group here if clipping the LED lead would be all right. I don't usually tell someone to remove the cover and start desoldering parts if they haven't done that sort of thing before. I was really trying to give you some information about what the LED is usually used for - it tells you that the power supply is working.
Cyclo, my hobbies included Ham Radio, RC boats and planes, electronic music(synthesizers), and computers. I played classical piano (Bach & Beethoven, that took many hours of practice after school) If I didn't practice the 2 hours after school, I didn't get dinner. So, I would walk the prairies in our Chicago suburbs and find 2 cent soda bottles and 5 cent beer bottles to pay for dinner - that was later as I learned to rebel.
I also worked at Allied Radio in Chicago for a couple of years before moving to CA. I was the guy sitting at a table assembling the Knight-Kits (showing how easy it was to build one) and helping customers if they didn't solder it together right. I had a gold badge which allowed me to go into stock and get the part the customer needed to finish the kit.
I bought the GTO with the money from working at Allied and learned how to tune it. I bought tools and got a manual from the library. I took a while to meet others who knew about cars to actually get some help. These interests made me go for physics in college and I ended up in LA, San Fran, and finally out here near Yosemite.
Jay, I have a Heathkit SB200 Linear Amplifier in operation today as part of my ham radio rig. That Heath 32" TV was a real humongous project. It must have taken a lot of time.
I also built speakers and various equalizers and test equipment to get the speakers positioned in the right place in the room. There was always the problem of the bass being too boomy if they were too close to the corner of the room. I had condenser mikes and active equalizers with sweep generators to get everything flat.
I worked for Keith Johnson, who invented focused-gap tape heads, which got him the money to start Gauss Electrophysics. He gave me the 100W/ch stereo amp with the 866 mercury vapor rectifier tubes along with an original Moog 901 Voltage Controlled Oscillator - still have it. He had a place in Topanga, CA where we hippies would go on weekends and let our hair down. Every room was covered with very colorful Moroccan tent material. The complete tent was erected inside the room. There were 30 hand-built speakers in the house with a 60 watt amplifier in each speaker. He had a large hole cut out of one room wall so he could project films using some very high intensity light source on to a 20 x 10 foot screen. It was quite a high tech place to go in the early 70's. We were down the street from Woodie Guthrie's place. It was fun.
Man, those electrolytics in the Marantz amp are big. It seems that the parts that age the most are capacitors. They are made of aluminum foil wrapped in some kind of insulator - like waxed paper or something equally fragile. They seem to swell up over time and start leaking the electrolyte that was supposed to keep the aluminum from moving around and shorting. Is the larger circular item there a toroidal transformer? A cap that big would be about a farad or so. I would see 2 farad caps advertised for car systems that run off 12 volt batteries. I never got one though. I still have some Dynaco amps. 120 Watt solid-state and a 60W/ch tube one. I still turn them on when I work in the garage and need some musical inspiration. It's getting to be the time to throw out all of the cassette tapes with Aretha and Earth, Wind and Fire. All this stuff is ancient. I still like to listen to it sometimes.
My sons listen to hardcore punk, eSx, and some metal. It's just not my cup of tea. The music scene doesn't really have much need for a keyboard these days. You gotta practice how to scream without losing the voice by tomorrow. I wonder what the throat singers from the East would say about this music?
"The music scene doesn't really have much need for a keyboard these days."--the Iggster. Keyboard manufacturers disagree all the way to the bank. The vast majority of bands that aren't just DJs with a rapper use keyboards.
My Kurzweil sits behind me as I webalize and it was VERY upset to read your assessment of "the music scene"!
I built that Heathkit TV in my Garage in Cardiff, CA. It was so big to work on, it was mostly on my workbench, but the backend was sitting on top of the box the kit came in. One night it rained so hard the humidity collapsed the box and bigaboom! Needless to say I did not save money building it, but it was a great TV (only the CRT broke, but that was the most expensive part) and I learned a lot about stuff that doesn't matter anymore.
HA! I just remember my carbon arc experiments. When I was maybe 14, I would take a free standing light fixture and sit it on my basement floor. I would take one of those giant batteries and take the carbon rods out and file them down to dust. I would turn off the circuit breaker to the light fixture, load the fixture with carbon dust and nuts and washers, then go over to the breaker box and flip the breaker on. It would short out immediately, but not before melting all the stuff in the fixture and sending up a shower of sparks. Probably cost about $50 of electricity! I'm surprised it didn't melt the meter by spinning it so fast! How I did not destroy my family home was good dumb luck many times over.
Yes, the big cylinder up front is the toroidal transformer. The 4 at the rear are the filter stage electrolytic caps. I haven't noticed any deterioration in sound at all and I am hoping that even if the caps have degraded they are still functional. I also don't do much "critical" listening anymore so I might not have noticed. BTW, the massive heatsinks cooling the output stage MOSFet power transitors on the amp are probably what makes up for 1/3rd of the amps 25kgs.
Analog TVs (Zenith, Magnavox, Hitachi) way back then were not that hard to repair... usually all you need is to eyeball which vacuum tube was not lighted up and you pulled it off from the socket and replaced it. The voltages in some of those circuits were very high though and you have to be careful to steer clear from these (ie. flyback transformer).
Regarding music it does look like keyboards have taken a pause nowadays... the golden age for those seem to be in the late 60's - early 70's when bands like Uriah Heep, Deep Purple, ELP, Allman Bros, The Doors, etc. featured keyboardists that went head to head vs guitarists.
I'm sorry to upset your Kurzweil, Jay. It does seem that most bands of this era have a bass, drums, an electric guitar and maybe a singer - I use the term loosely. I have an old baby grand piano and a Korg X-50 synth that still gets some use. But, it's only for accompaniment for our choir sessions. We don't have any jam sessions as we used to. Rock and Roll and blues have become a thing of the past. I still keep one Mapleleaf Rag ready if I'm asked to play something. But, the Doors (did you know that they always played in Dorian mode?) and the Almond Brothers are not known by today's youth. I also really liked Steely Dan and the Doobie Bros. I can play some of their songs. But, we can't just sit and reminisce all day. Sonic Youth, Rage Against the Machine, Primus, Red Hot Chillie Peppers, seem to be the bands of today - I know I'm already out of date. They do actually use keyboards at times. So all's not lost.
Heh, no,..but the lamp fixture I used was thw regular nightstand lamp in the spare bedroom, and the socket became fairly charred/scarred up. One day mom turned on the lamp to clean, and by coincidence the bulb burned out before she had finished. SO as she is replacing the bulb she notices all the arc damage, and claimed to be surprised that the house hadn't burned down with the fixture burning up that bad. lol she thought the damage had just happened whn the light burnt out.
I used to charge up large electrolytics and leave them on the floor for our cat to come snooping around.
And, I had this extensive H.O. slot car set up, with the track permanently mounted to two sheets of plywood, complete with landscaping, grass, trees, grandstands, pits etc etc, and I used to play monster mouse, allowing the white mice that I frequently launched in my model rockets, to roam free across the track, pretending it was a 1950's "B" movie scene. heh, when the mice would walk across the track I'd max out the thumb comtroller, and watch the mice jump a good 10" straight up. Man I wish we could have afforded a video cam way back then.
Comments
What I'm telling you is based on the fact that I'm a retired electronics engineer. I've designed quite a few power supplies being used today in satellites constructed at UCBerkeley.
I'm not just giving you some bull carp. I know what I'm talking about in this arena. I worked 18 years, off and on, as a rocket scientist at Space Sciences Lab at UCBerkeley.
Oh yeah, duct tape would solve this major dilemna very well.
Nowadays almost no one builds/assembles/repairs electronics anymore... its too bad. People just throw away things and buy cheap new stuff. Maybe when the price of rare earth (neodymium for example was used in higher end speakers though probably not anymore) becomes too high because it is becoming more difficult to find and mine these, people will be forced to recycle / repair electronics once again.
I just thought you were asking the group here if clipping the LED lead would be all right. I don't usually tell someone to remove the cover and start desoldering
parts if they haven't done that sort of thing before. I was really trying to give you some information about what the LED is usually used for - it tells you that the power supply
is working.
Cyclo, my hobbies included Ham Radio, RC boats and planes, electronic music(synthesizers), and computers. I played classical piano (Bach & Beethoven, that took many hours of practice after school)
If I didn't practice the 2 hours after school, I didn't get dinner. So, I would walk the prairies in our Chicago suburbs and find 2 cent soda bottles and 5 cent beer bottles to pay for dinner - that was later as I learned to rebel.
I also worked at Allied Radio in Chicago for a couple of years before moving to CA. I was the guy sitting at a table assembling the Knight-Kits (showing how easy it was to build one) and helping customers if they didn't solder it together right. I had a gold badge which allowed me to go into stock and get the part the customer needed to finish the kit.
I bought the GTO with the money from working at Allied and learned how to tune it. I bought tools and got a manual from the library. I took a while to meet others who knew about cars to actually get some help. These interests made me go for physics in college and I ended up in LA, San Fran, and finally out here near Yosemite.
Jay, I have a Heathkit SB200 Linear Amplifier in operation today as part of my ham radio rig. That Heath 32" TV was a real humongous project. It must have taken a lot of time.
I also built speakers and various equalizers and test equipment to get the speakers positioned in the right place in the room. There was always the problem of the bass being too boomy if they were too close to the corner of the room. I had condenser mikes and active equalizers with sweep generators to get everything flat.
I worked for Keith Johnson, who invented focused-gap tape heads, which got him the money to start Gauss Electrophysics. He gave me the 100W/ch stereo amp with the 866 mercury vapor rectifier tubes along with an original Moog 901 Voltage Controlled Oscillator - still have it. He had a place in Topanga, CA where we hippies would go on weekends and let our hair down. Every room was covered with very colorful Moroccan tent material. The complete tent was erected inside the room. There were 30 hand-built speakers in the house with a 60 watt amplifier in each speaker. He had a large hole cut out of one room wall so he could project films using some very high intensity light source on to a 20 x 10 foot screen.
It was quite a high tech place to go in the early 70's. We were down the street from Woodie Guthrie's place. It was fun.
equally fragile. They seem to swell up over time and start leaking the electrolyte that was supposed to keep the aluminum from moving around and shorting.
Is the larger circular item there a toroidal transformer? A cap that big would be about a farad or so. I would see 2 farad caps advertised for car systems that run off 12 volt batteries. I never got one though.
I still have some Dynaco amps. 120 Watt solid-state and a 60W/ch tube one. I still turn them on when I work in the garage and need some musical inspiration. It's getting to be the time to throw out all of
the cassette tapes with Aretha and Earth, Wind and Fire. All this stuff is ancient. I still like to listen to it sometimes.
My sons listen to hardcore punk, eSx, and some metal. It's just not my cup of tea. The music scene doesn't really have much need for a keyboard these days. You gotta practice how to scream without losing the voice by tomorrow. I wonder what the throat singers from the East would say about this music?
My Kurzweil sits behind me as I webalize and it was VERY upset to read your assessment of "the music scene"!
I built that Heathkit TV in my Garage in Cardiff, CA. It was so big to work on, it was mostly on my workbench, but the backend was sitting on top of the box the kit came in. One night it rained so hard the humidity collapsed the box and bigaboom! Needless to say I did not save money building it, but it was a great TV (only the CRT broke, but that was the most expensive part) and I learned a lot about stuff that doesn't matter anymore.
HA! I just remember my carbon arc experiments. When I was maybe 14, I would take a free standing light fixture and sit it on my basement floor. I would take one of those giant batteries and take the carbon rods out and file them down to dust. I would turn off the circuit breaker to the light fixture, load the fixture with carbon dust and nuts and washers, then go over to the breaker box and flip the breaker on. It would short out immediately, but not before melting all the stuff in the fixture and sending up a shower of sparks. Probably cost about $50 of electricity! I'm surprised it didn't melt the meter by spinning it so fast! How I did not destroy my family home was good dumb luck many times over.
Analog TVs (Zenith, Magnavox, Hitachi) way back then were not that hard to repair... usually all you need is to eyeball which vacuum tube was not lighted up and you pulled it off from the socket and replaced it. The voltages in some of those circuits were very high though and you have to be careful to steer clear from these (ie. flyback transformer).
Regarding music it does look like keyboards have taken a pause nowadays... the golden age for those seem to be in the late 60's - early 70's when bands like Uriah Heep, Deep Purple, ELP, Allman Bros, The Doors, etc. featured keyboardists that went head to head vs guitarists.
X-50 synth that still gets some use. But, it's only for accompaniment for our choir sessions. We don't have any jam sessions as we used to. Rock and Roll and blues have become a thing of the past. I still
keep one Mapleleaf Rag ready if I'm asked to play something. But, the Doors (did you know that they always played in Dorian mode?) and the Almond Brothers are not known by today's youth. I also really liked Steely Dan and the Doobie Bros. I can play some of their songs.
But, we can't just sit and reminisce all day. Sonic Youth, Rage Against the Machine, Primus, Red Hot Chillie Peppers, seem to be the bands of today - I know I'm already out of date. They do actually use keyboards at times. So all's not lost.
I used to charge up large electrolytics and leave them on the floor for our cat to come snooping around.
And, I had this extensive H.O. slot car set up, with the track permanently mounted to two sheets of plywood, complete with landscaping, grass, trees, grandstands, pits etc etc, and I used to play monster mouse, allowing the white mice that I frequently launched in my model rockets, to roam free across the track, pretending it was a 1950's "B" movie scene. heh, when the mice would walk across the track I'd max out the thumb comtroller, and watch the mice jump a good 10" straight up. Man I wish we could have afforded a video cam way back then.