Re: Long and serious, but important

[Kim Flint <kflint@chromatic.com>]

Andre-

Your post deserves a much more thoughtful repy than what I have time for
now, but I just wanted to correct another mythical rumor:


>Now then, many people have talked about upgrading their Echoplexes to the
>full 198 second configuration since the beginning of the list.  Until the
>last week or so, however, there wasn't *one single warning* from anyone
>associated with the unit on this list that doing this might have the
>slightly detrimental result of causing your controls to freeze up in the
>midst of performance!  (This was the primary source of my comment
>referring to the Echoplex as "what appears to be an increasingly
>problematic unit.")

The reason no one ever stated anything like that is because it is not true.
None of the possible memory configurations cause crashes or problems. This
particular rumor sources to a fellow who posted a review on the Harmony
central site, wherein he said that installing more memory caused the unit 
to
behave erratically and crash. I talked with him and sorted out his 
problems,
and it wasn't the memory that caused it.

His problem was the same thermal problem that I will probably be explaining
to people for the rest of my life. Once again: older units have a circuit
error that caused the Undo switch to execute record when the unit was hot.
New units do not have this problem. If you have an older unit, the
modification to fix this is very simple. You can do it yourself, I'll be
happy to explain it to you. 

The only reason installing more simms might cause this problem is if the
simms you get draw a significantly larger amount of current than the simms
it came with. This is **highly unlikely** because 4M simms are typically
made from a more modern technology that consumes less power than the older
256k simms that are used in a stock 12sec echoplex. I measured current draw
on a bunch of simms while I was at gibson, and found the worst by far to be
an old set of 256k's. It definitely was not an exhaustive test, but it is
telling.

In any event, this is a very easy thing to fix.

Also, this is an example of what I was saying before, about the problematic
nature of public forums such as this. Rumors spread quickly, yet are nearly
impossible to fully dispell. There are certainly more dramatic internet
examples than our poor maligned echoplex....

more later......


wondering why I do this for free,

kim


_______________________________________________________
Kim Flint                       408-752-9284
OEM Engineering                 kflint@chromatic.com
Chromatic Research