Friday, October 17, 2008

Fixing an M-Audio Delta 1010

Its 1am and Amarok throws on Santana - Europa.

Santana and Jazz music does to me, what belly rubbing does for dogs. So I go over to the amp and plug in my guitar. But I woops'd and I pushed my Delta 1010 off the table.

The poor thing must have only fallen 2ft at most. But when I went to hook it up again, it was dead :( No power light, no sounds, nothing.

Heart broken, I picked it up and opened it. One of the 2200uF capacitors looked like it was oozing out something, but using a volt-meter, it was indeed holding charge. There was a little black box near the power connector that I wasn't sure about. So after some googling I found that it was a Relay, made by Hsin Da Taiwan.

After reading the wikipedia article on relays and learning they have "moving parts", I took a guess that this chap might have broken from the fall.

I shopped around for parts, but no one has this relay in stock. And those that listed this item had archived it as "obsolete".


So I went off googling again to find a data sheet so I could find a similar relay as a replacement. Miraculously i found a data sheet for this very relay on a German website. I printed it out and took it to the an electronics store a few blocks away from my house.


The closest matching relay I could fine was this Sanyou. Only off by 2volts and costing CAD$2.99, I decided to buy it.

Sadly this new relay was a 5 pin chip, whilst the original was a 6 pin. Therefore I couldn't mount it directly onto the Delta. So I had to hot wire it.

I cut out the floppy cable from an old PSU and soldered one end to the pins of the relay, and the other to 2cm long cuts of a G-String from an electrical guitar. I chose to do this so I would have something stiff to solder onto the board.

Slightly embarrassed about my shotty soldering, this is how it turned out.Anyhow, I moved on and replaced that leaky capacitor and wrapped up everything with a bit of insulation tape. I began putting everything back into the case. With 2 screws left I forgot to put the steel jacked back onto the data cable port. So I had to take out everything out again and put it together again.

Tucked the hot-wired relay to a side and it was starting to look pretty decent.

In this picture you can see the new capacitor too, as its coloured blue and stands out from the other black coloured capacitors.






So plugged it in, and got that green power LED! Switched on the jack server, and we had sound!!! Happy Day. I was thoroughly impressed with myself. I'm a pro M-Audio Delta 1010 Technician now :)

No comments: