Blog

Soundtracs reborn..

An adventure in tracking, trouble-shooting and triumph.

Well it all started one day when I was looking over the Audio Trading group on Facebook, thinking of new and exciting was to spend money. I had been looking for a Soundtracs console for many years now and there always seemed to be something that got in the way. It was too far away to collect, it was too expensive or I just wasn’t in a position to purchase it. Then I found the Sequel 2. An odd ball model of sorts, and one I had not heard of, but as it turns out it was a variation of my favourite model the Solitare. Now the sequel was designed primarily as a live console so it missed out on the automation system that the Solitare had, and it was not an inline monitoring console. Both things I could do without, however there were still some other issues. It was close by which is good when you need to transport 130kgs of 2 meter wide audio goodness, but was not what you would call “fully functional”. So after a bit of negotiation I finally made the deal and picked it up.

I had with the console a list written out for me by the previous owner of all of the working and not working channels and a verbal run down of the other problems she was having. Oh dear, what had I just taken on. Of the 48 channels, the desk had only 21 that were fully functional, and the dynamics control computer seemed to be fried! Never one to be beaten down, I commenced a global treasure hunt, and managed to track down a manual! In the process I started up a dialogue with THE Soundtracs man, Tim Jones in the UK. He was instrumental in being able to bring this beauty back to life and has a wealth of information not only from personal experience, but also the original factory service information.

So it began, pulling the channel strips out one by one and testing and probing them to find their faults. There was a lot of corrosion and general gunk in and on the console, built up over the 20 year life it had lived. A significant amount of time was spent cleaning. Eventually I began to restore the channel strips to a fully working state, one by one, and things were looking good. In between waiting for parts to arrive I set about tiding up the external appearance of the console which involved removing the wrist guard and cheeks and re-dying them in a darker than factory grey. I also removed and re-painted the meter bridge. This turned out to be a good move, as in the process of removing the meter bridge, we discovered the cause of some strange rattling noises heard when we moved the console. Over time some (most) of the screws holding the meter bridge to the frame had come loose and were floating around in the bottom of the frame. NOT GOOD! So with a fresh coat of paint and all of the screws returned to their rightful positions, the meter bridge was re installed. The lamps in the meters were all replaced, and the newly dyed moldings were reattached. It’s was starting to take shape again.

The biggest problem I had yet to face was the dynamics processing and control computer. While not essential, I had spent so much time this far I wanted to see if I could get it back to 100%. It took a lot of troubleshooting, and eventually I isolated the issue to one of the three processor boards. They work in groups of 16 channels, so even with 2 functional processors I had 32 channels of dynamics now working. There was just that last one, trying its hardest to defeat me, and I wasn’t about to stand for that. After much more probing and troubleshooting I almost by accident found the problem and it was one you would not expect to find or repair easily. The last board had a break in one of the copper traces that was most likely corroded by whatever I used to clean off the boards when I first pulled them out. So after repairing the broken traces and some general reinforcements of some others it was time to try it out again. To my delight the display now showed the message:

“SYSTEM OK 48 CHANNELS”

All restored and back together, she has a great history behind her. 20 solid years of music and touring in Australia. Let’s hope there is another 20 odd years of great music to still be run through this magnificent console.

Mark Lapthorne