Quote Originally Posted by Marcel View Post
My worst experiences with noise were during World Expo 88 in Brisbane.

The first was with the new you-beaut latest model 32 band stereo graphic equalisers that were in use everywhere and used a proprietary chip that often went noisy. I must have replaced at least 100 of those 12 pin inline goop encased sub-boards that held the chip which for nil obvious reason would randomly simply start generating higher levels of hiss that was not unlike a reverse biased diode.

The second was the Soundcraft 40ch/16bus foldback console on the river stage. The sound guys and the artists all complained about the poor noise floor while doing shows, so we contacted Soundcraft in the UK. They were very nice yet somewhat apprehensive when they advised of a modification that could be done to this $150k console. Ultimately after many phone calls and various assurances I performed the modification which involved a number of wire and solder changes and taking a dremmel to every board in the desk... I had a 11hr window to do the work which took 9hrs with the dremmel and all the while in the back of my head I knew that this one desk was worth more at the time than most inner city Brisbane CBD apartments, plus the desk had to be back in service by 10am.... The mod worked fine but it was Yay, and team me totally stressed out and dead dog tired by the end...

A side note of trivia - my avatar is a pic of some Gold Silk embroidery on a Black denim jacket I had done at the China pavilion during the Expo...

Now that you mentioned Soundcraft gear, a good mate of mine got me to do some restoration work on his 80's vintage 28 Channel Soundcraft mixing desk, apparently some rats or other rodents got into it and randomly chewed the ribbon cabling to pieces, I had the job of cutting out all the worst-chewed pieces and splicing all the good bits together, I had to literally solder and heatshrink 80+ individual strands of wire every time I spliced the ribbon cabling together, incidentally the ribbon cabling was what distributed the audio signals from each of the 28 Channels, so it was a big job, I eventually got it to the point where it was something like 80% working and had to turn my attention to a mini-jack patch panel, I was getting signal to pretty much every part of the patch panel as it was supposed to, but there was one mini-jack that appeared to be faulty, I decided to use a X10 magnifying loupe to give the suspect jack a good eyeball and as it turned out the cause of the fault turned out to be an insignificant piece of lint wedged between two contacts, I cleaned it out and the mini-jack worked normally again, the guy who owns the Soundcraft desk runs a recording studio and wants me to do a re-cap job on all the channel strips to get each one sounding consistent so he can use it as part of his studio setup, most of the caps in the channels are electrolytics which I'm guessing are easily over 20 years old by now and are probably due for replacement, they are all RT style that are wrapped in a translucent-blue film, looks like a fun job for me, I still have fond memories of the work I did on it, tracing out all the signal paths with my Signal-Generator and Oscilloscope.