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Muses Volume

I've given up on using the Muses volume controller in my preamp project. I had the controller working with the display and IR receiver but, after taking meticulous care to check and hook-up the attenuator boards, nothing works any more - Muses seems to be very fragile as this isn't the first problem I've had with a Muses solution. Perhaps I'll find the enthusiasm to try and fix it one day.

I have removed all of the Muses modules and will install some Slagle autoformers instead, which will be less convenient but probably sound better.

He ho!
 
Ok, your solder skills should good enough for SMD…
Well, I don't think the soldering was the problem, Thimios did a very professional job for me;

https://www.diyaudio.com/community/threads/muses-volume.322983/page-26#post-6645574
I've now had this one and an Academy Audio board just simply stop working for no apparent reason and there are quite a few reports on this thread of other people struggling to get the thing working...

This one was working until I connected the boards with wires instead of plugging them together and the connections were made meticulously, go figure.
 
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the Muses is not really fragile.
It really is not fragile!
Once solving problems, that are mostly own errors not related to design, it stands solid abuse. I was making large modifications to V1 which include tracks cutting, multiple additional parts soldering and de soldering etc. and it works reliably.

Now, I’m on V2 and it works perfect. Though, some gremlin was involved with one controller board.
That’s how it can be with advanced designs.
 
Hey guys,
I am having trouble getting the volume control to work and could use your help. I have an unbalanced setup consisting of a mainboard and one controller and volume board.
In the end I want to integrate the Muses into my BA2018 preamp.
So far I have completed all of the boards and did several test runs. Because I am lacking a variac I had to put the finished baords into my preamp case and hook it up to the VRDN power supply. No smoke and nothing otherwise bad happened - so far so good. I furthermore was able to verify that the controller led is working for example when muting via pressing the encorder. The process of teaching a remote control and using it to also works. When switching channels I can hear the relais click and the respective channel led lights up afterwards.
Now to the problem at hand: I am getting absolutely no ouptut from the volume control. It is dead silent.
Is there any way I can verify, that the muses ic is working? Unfortunately my toolset is kind of limited to a dmm. Where would I start measuring and how? I have attached several photos of the controller and the volume boards.
 

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I verified that I got a signal not with a sine wave but via playing music and testing for AC voltages at X4 / X5 "in". Is that correct? Sorry, kind of a noob here... Due to the stacked layout I could not follow the signal path any further to the muses.
I did not test the boards without the mainboard yet. In order to do so I would have to set J2 on the controller board between 2 and 3, right?
 
Thanks for the suggestion! I tried that today (soldered J1 between positions 1 and 2 and set the controller balanced mode to balanced via 0-0-0-8-0-0-1). Unfortunately I still cannot measure any signal at X4 it X5 out. Is it possible that the muses chip could be defective? I took extra care not to overheat it while soldering.