Wireless mic repair – Line 6 XD-V30

Wireless mic repair - line 6 XD-30

This wireless mic repair came in from the singer of Newark soul band the Acetones.

Both units powered up but no sound came from the receiver when the mic was used.

Upon investigation I discovered that the transmitter and receiver were able to communicate. They use 2.4GHz. The unit has 6 wireless channels, all of which were communicating, but not passing audio.

wireless mic repair

I discovered that the connection between the capsule and the transmitter was broken. The connection was made by 3 sprung pins on the transmitter and 3 concentric gold plated rings on the capsule. It’s a nice idea to allow easy swapping of capsules and easy manufacture, but here it wasn’t working properly! I soldered the two modules together permanently to ensure a good connection.

If you have a wireless mic repair, please get in touch.

PA speaker repair – dB Arena 10

pa speaker repair

Last year I completed a PA speaker repair, I’ve just found the photos of the damaged crossover so I thought I’d blog the repair.

The owner had bought a pair of these nice dB Arena 10 speakers from a disreputable eBay seller. One was working, but the other had a fried HF compression driver and a damaged crossover.

Fortunately the 1 inch dB compression drivers are commonly available from the likes of Thomann so this was easily replaced.

A resistor had also burnt out in the crossover so I replaced this with a higher spec part.

Upon completion I graphed the frequency response of the crossover and compared it with a known good unit.db arena repair

If you have a Pa speaker repair, please get in touch.

Smoke machine repair

smoke machine repair

A smoke machine repair, brought to my Newark workshop by a Grantham based DJ.

This is a fairly simple unit: A power supply, a thermostat and a relay to control the power to the smoke heater. There is also an external remote on a 6.5mm 3 pole jack cable.

The customer was finding that the relay sometimes did not switch on the heater. The problem was intermittent, meaning that it would sometimes happen, but sometimes it would not! Despite filling my workshop with smoke on many occasions, I couldnt replicate the fault.

Upon investigation, I discovered that the jack socket had a slightly loose sleeve connection so I replaced the socket with another. After a bit more smoking the problem still didn’t manifest itself, so I returned the unit to the customer.

If you have a smoke machine repair for me, please get in touch.

LED lighting repair – Unbranded LED Parcan

LED lighting repair - Safety Earth repair

This LED lighting repair was a bit of a horror story! Aside from fixing the problems with the two lights brought in, they needed several modifications to improve the unit safety.

They were brought to me by a Grantham based DJ. One of the lights wouldn’t power up, whilst the other had a flicker on the red LEDs.

The powerup issue was caused by a faulty power board. The unit has a cheap SMPS that the customer informed me had blown up before and been replaced by the manufacturer. Unfortunately they couldn’t provide spare this time so I swapped in the PSU from the Red flicker unit.
LED lighting repair - new grille
I then repaired the red flicker unit by reflowing the red joints on the front face. Although I found another off the shelf internal supply to fix this, the replacement boards were judged to be too expensive to warrant this course of action. Instead, I fitted a DC socket to allow the customer to power the unit from a cheap external power supply. This also gets around the safety issues detailed below by removing mains from the unit.

I was quite alarmed by the breaches of safety good practice in these LED lights.

The first thing that I spotted was dubious safety earth connection – shown in the picture. The manufacturer had simply twirled the safety earth round a mounting pillar and screwed a nut on top. Unsurprisingly, The earth connection was already loose when I opened the unit. I fixed this by soldering the wire to a solder tag and refixing to the pillar using a Nyloc nut. These are special nuts that do not loosen in the same way as traditional nuts. To comply with safety regulations, the safety earth should have its own fixing point, but this was impossible to modify without compromising the unit function.
LED lighting repair - new power board
The next safety issue that I noticed suring the LED lighting repair was that the board’s PSU was next to a grille with large holes, allowing a person with small fingers (a child) to inadvertently touch the AC mains through the chassis. this was particularly worrying, so I fitted a mesh with 3mm holes inside the existing grille. I used Nylon fixings to prevent any connection of the mesh to the mains board.

If you have an LED lighting repair, please contact me.

DJ Mixer Repair – Kam KAP1500 Audio Pro

DJ mixer repair KAM 1500 Stock image

This DJ Mixer repair was a bit of a departure for me, but I did it for an old customer.

The mixer is getting a bit long in the tooth: the send and PFL (pre fade listen) buttons were intermittent, the faders were scratchy and an intermittent fault with the echo unit.

The faders were easy – they simply need contact cleaner spraying inside. However one fader (mic 3) exhibited crackle even after cleaning. It didn’t sound like dirt, so I investigated further.

Upon investigating the issues with the echo and the mic3 fader I discovered that the board had several dry and cracked solder joints. Some joints just had very fine hairline cracks. I repaired the broken joints which fixed the mic3 and echo issues and I was able to identify that a certain pad to pin hole ratio was particularly problematic. This allowed me to take preventative action on similar sized joints across the board.

The next task was to fix the faulty intermittent PFL and Send switches. This required complete disassembly to allow the spraying of contact cleaner into the switches. The biggest challenge with a unit like this isn’t technical – it’s just the time it takes to remove the 50+ knobs and switches!

The image is a stcok image as I didn’t take a photo this time.

If you have a dj mixer repair, please get in touch via the contact page.