What’s On the Bench Tonight (OBT)

🙂
And I could still use one more.

The Fluke 101 is awesome and totally worth $57. Price is very reasonable. Absolute reliability and has a nice AC mV scale that is similar to audio band noise that the bigger units don’t have. They pick up too much out of band noise. The 101 if it measures 0.1mV AC at speaker outputs, you have a silent amp. I aim for 0.0mV Ac for headphone amps. Great for tracing ground loops.
 
As per my earlier post #788, Today I finally got the set of gears for my Technics double cassette deck.
The parts came from the Netherlands, and suprised me, as I thought it wouldn't get here until later this month.
So 12 days isn't too bad.
The gears are intermediate drives for the right side takeup reels in each deck, and the original ones are made from a soft-ish vinyl material, the teeth can break off during the quick stop on rewinding, and once that happens it makes a soft click noise in forward play mode (but not in reverse play/rewind).

The new gears are of a sturdier, stiffer plastic, and seem perfect, and should last forever.
I'll do the job once the 4th BBQ/entertaining holiday is over, I'm not in a rush to play cassettes.
 
On the bench was the Bob Carver PSU - and I found the source of the mechanical buzzing. It turns out X7R ceramic caps are piezoelectric (and in fact, make a great actuator), and should not be used where there are large AC voltages (such as a trafo secondary snubber). We have 360VAC here so a definite piezo “actuator”. I replaced these with film caps and the PSU is now silent. Troubleshooting source of buzz was with the help from Keantoken and JPS64.


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Play station generation here saying Hello
Honestly i need to recap my PS2 , sony used dustbin grade capacitor despite being Rubycon.
I went from Atari 2600 to Playstation (1) myself. Missed all the intermediate Nintendo and Sega and others. Had a Commodore 64 and then an Amiga A500 though. Lots of cool games on the latter.

Rocking a PS4 Pro currently. We had the PS5 in the shopping cart at launch but we all know how this played out... Before that we had a PS3, which is still quite a good platform, and briefly a normal PS4.

I do have an RTX 2080 on my main PC but that's for research, not gaming although I easily could do that. Will test it with a game doing real-time ray-tracing one day. When I was studying Computer Science Engineering, ray-tracing a single frame was a multi-day affair IIRC.

PS all the way, never XBox, and I even find maintaining a PC a chore. Perhaps a DIY Arcade box using MAME will be in the work one day, for nostalgia's sake. Some of the older games are really great for casual gaming.

We just got an AVR last Friday to go with the new front towers, completing a Sony setup. Really frugal with that kind of gear, but at least now we have Atmos. I have yet to install the Surround again, and then I want to test adding the elevation speakers.

The AVR does an OK job faking surround - it is called Front Surround, but it's not the same thing.

The manual indicates the AVR also does DSD which is my favourite format, but only through HDMI. I am not sure I can get my PC to output DSD via the NVIDIA's HDMI port though.
 
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