Dave tears down a monster of a mixing console!
A Professional 40 channel Yamaha M3000 mixer designed for sound reinforcement and concerts.
That's some old school analog mixing console porn
Dave mentioned it not being build to a price point, but I think it always is. Adds up these parts for a mixing console so you want to be as efficient as possible.
I have repaired a few of them (although no top studio grade ones - but semi-pro) and they're all sort of built the same (and work the same). Single sided pcb's usually. Although I repaired a Behringer - which is known for being pretty cheap- that had a double sided board, but it was a single board for 8 channels.
I would love a mixer like that - but if I dared suggest I could take it off Dave's hands, I'd be dispatched to the garage and end up sleeping on it.
Nice vid.
Single sided and through-hole is as repair friendly as it gets and those beasts had this aspect on top of their priority list. There should be some scratchy faders as expected in that old guy but the elcos are holding. Ruggedness (hence the chassis brass spine beams), accessible maintenance, and low noise was the name of the game in such stuff. Even low noise Toshiba 2SC2240s seen in the phantom module. I had mixed live music professionally night in-night out on such Yamaha consoles and they were always enough good sounding and dependable for the job.
It could be cut down to make it more usable and get plenty of spares in the process!
I know a guy who has two of those in his house.
Good consoles, not like Midas Heritage 3000 grade of course ($$$), but very honest gear
Here is it powered up in a short check video I found on YouTube for completeness
For the non audiophile like myself, what does/did this thing retail for? Are smick Pro models these days all DSP?
An M3000 maybe US$2000 but if in top condition rather circa US$5000. A Midas Heritage 3000 in top condition maybe US$30000
...Are smick Pro models these days all DSP?
Yep, but analogue mixers are still around because of many second hand bargains and straightforwardly fast to operate. Mostly for foldback mixing (for the stage monitoring) not so much front of house (FOH) in bigger events anymore
If you like real audio desk porn, go look for AMS /Neve / Calrec / Euphonix and SSL...
Since the 70s these guys have been making studio consoles that sell for upwards of A$200K
Are smick Pro models these days all DSP?
Yep.
I know a guy who has a 96-channel beast at home. It looks a lot like that one but has more LCDs and LEDs.
Every single knob and slider on it is motorized, you can press buttons and every single control moves into position for the track you were working on. Every control also lights up when you touch it (capacitive sensing?) It's a schmick piece of kit.
But these days he doesn't use it much. It's all PC based editing/mixing with multiple monitors.
I haven't been able to find photos of the pots used in this thing. I know it was too much trouble for Dave to look at that part because you need to remove all the knobs and even more screws. Markus Fuller rarely disassembles those bits anymore too because it's just a lot of the same parts repeated over and over but I always like looking at audio gear and what kind of quality the pots are.
About a year ago I got hands dirty with a former soviet made analog mixing console... The smell of decades worth of audio engineer sweat is priceless!
"Bad Ass Semi Corp." - lol.
I think the board under the master control was not fully extended to the right side because that is where the side panel goes on the little brother.
I designed analog mixing console for a living for many years (about 35, with some interruptions).
I hope that this long post will not annoy the readers...
My curiosity pushed me to open every console I could put my hands on, and truly appreciated Yamaha's models for their technical (and sound) quality and reliability and mechanical robustness: this is VERY important: in live tours it was not unusual to repair broken pots when a stage hand walked on the console, or to have a upper panel bent, and all the channel's pots broken, for some mysterious accident (the console fell off the stage).
I remember well an old Midas desk, a model LS4, 32 into 8 into 2, live sound console: a friend bought one in 1980, at the cheap sum of 17,559 pounds ex works (about 60.000 to 100.000 pounds to-day), then the price of a small house..
It sounded extremely well, better than my designs, and was built like a tank (you needed two or four very strong men to move it).
When left in the summer sun, the frame heated and expanded, and channel 1 (the leftmost module) worked intermittently because it disconnected from the bus PCB. We had to adjust some clearances.
What I can criticise of this Yamaha model (and many other model of the same Company) is the extremely complicated wiring of this console: too many cables, too many connectors, too many wiring looms...
Open a Soundcraft or an Amek of the same age: most of the wiring is done with a flat cable or a bus board connecting all the modules.
I read previous posters asking why there are still analog mixers on the market: the reason is the ease of use in respect to the digital ones: a competent mixing engineer can use any analog mixer after a very short time, whilst any digital mixer is quite different from the others, and there is a step learning curve. If you have a desk in a location that will be used by different mixing engineers, analog is better.
About the single sided vs double side PCB, and the SMD vs through-hole components discussion, you must consider that the channel's PCB main dimension is dictated by the number of controls (pots and switches) and the distance between them, for ease of operation. Most of the times this allows for a single sided board.
The number of boards that will be manufactured is usually very high, especially for input channel's boards (there are from 8 to 48 of them in a desk), so automatic placement of through-hole parts is economically reasonable (surface mounting is most of the times impractical because a single sided board needs space for traces under the components). Automatic placements allows for a lot of wire jumpers (or Zero Ohm resistors) to be used at almost no cost.
In fact, only the modules that are lower in number (eg master, groups, effects) were double sided.
For consoles that were intended for large numbers, we (and some competitor) used another solution : the channel's PCB was single-sided, and it carried all controls and connectors and some large component, whilst about all of the module's circuitry was on a custom hybrid circuit.
This resulted in a simplified production process (hybrids were tested and adjusted by the supplier, with automatic equipment) and an easier maintenance (if no pot is broken, replace the hybrid).
Now a double sided board of decent quality has about the same cost than a single sided one, so a channel is built with SMD standard parts on a double sided board.
Best regards
Even low noise Toshiba 2SC2240s seen in the phantom module.
The 2SC2240s will be the first stage of the balanced mic preamp before an opamp - a simpler version of the circuit here -
http://www.sound.westhost.com/project66.htm - note the position of the gain control, which needs to be a reverse log pot.
The construction of this mixer is rather unusual and reflects its Japanese origin - normally mixers of that size will have a single vertical board for each channel, as ciccio said, either linked by ribbon cable, or plugging into a motherboard.
Despite Dave's lack of knowledge, most of what he said was basically correct - one mistake was that the faders are not high quality - they looked cheap and cheerful carbon track ones, possibly made by Alps. However, they may just control a DC voltage for the VCA rather than passing audio (can't be bothered to read the manual to check).
The digital side of it is almost certainly just programmable mutes for the input channels, possibly for the outputs as well - recallable by the front panel switches or the MIDI input.
Large analogue mixers are pretty much obsolete now as digital (ie DSP) has virtually taken over.
Large analogue mixers are pretty much obsolete now as digital (ie DSP) has virtually taken over.
Bite your tongue! :p
It's true that many tours these days will opt for DigiCo or Avid desks due to the small footprints and built in processing/dynamics, but there are still many engineers who prefer the sound of analog.
The Midas XL4 is one such desk still enjoying its share of road time. This 270+kg behemoth is pretty much considered the Gold Standard of analog live consoles, and it's substantially easier to disassemble!
I read previous posters asking why there are still analog mixers on the market: the reason is the ease of use in respect to the digital ones: a competent mixing engineer can use any analog mixer after a very short time, whilst any digital mixer is quite different from the others, and there is a step learning curve. If you have a desk in a location that will be used by different mixing engineers, analog is better.
That digital learning curve is not insignificant. On an analog mixer you know what each knob does and can see it's state by just looking at it. There are no 'alternate' functions - what you see is what you have.
FWIW a mixing matrix is a simple enough concept to understand - but is a bit more of a challenge to use effectively.