ADA8000 issues

[steel53]

Channel 8 is on the transformer end. I had the same problem as above but at least so far it has only been that one channel, and only on the oldest ADA 8000. Since then I've added the transformer. No new problems yet. I leave the ADA's on for days.

[Ian Alexander]

An ADA8000 in my VO studio does headphone amp feed, talkback mic pre, in and out for phone patch, etc. Thursday it worked fine. Today, nothing. No audio, no lights, totally dead. Did a phone patch session this morning with no headphones, holding the telephone up to my ear. After 25 minutes of narration, my left arm was a little unhappy.

I found another ADA8000 at a local Sam Ash with scratches and no rack ears (somebody lost theirs?) for $135. Plugged it in and all's fine. Now I gotta see if my local Mr. Fixit will look at the dead one for less than replacement cost. Then I'll have a backup.

I keep looking for other options, but can't find anything like it for even twice the price. For my purposes here, it's a no brainer.

And yes, I checked the fuse.

[RBIngraham]

I use the 120 to 100 volt stepdown transformer (for Japan?). The ADA-8000's work flawlessly with that and they seem to run quite a bit cooler. Four of them on top of each other ran quite a bit hotter with straight 120 volts.

Sorry. Nonsense was not the best choice of words. I'm sure that it does make a difference. I just think that it's nonsense that it needs to be done in the first place is all.

[RBIngraham]

An ADA8000 in my VO studio does headphone amp feed, talkback mic pre, in and out for phone patch, etc. Thursday it worked fine. Today, nothing. No audio, no lights, totally dead. Did a phone patch session this morning with no headphones, holding the telephone up to my ear. After 25 minutes of narration, my left arm was a little unhappy.

I found another ADA8000 at a local Sam Ash with scratches and no rack ears (somebody lost theirs?) for $135. Plugged it in and all's fine. Now I gotta see if my local Mr. Fixit will look at the dead one for less than replacement cost. Then I'll have a backup.

I keep looking for other options, but can't find anything like it for even twice the price. For my purposes here, it's a no brainer.

And yes, I checked the fuse.

The closest thing in price is the Presonus units, the D8 or the Digimax FS. The FS is pretty much the same feature wise, 8 inputs and 8 output. The D8 is just 8 inputs only. But the FS is more than twice the price, more like $500 to $600 unless you buy in significant quantities. Still if I had the budgets to justify that is the direction I would go. But not right now.

[Phil]

http://salestores.com/powerb09.html

Tried to order, Shipping was like 30 buck and they have a $100 minimum.

<sigh>

any one buy one from any other vender's?

[905shmick]

Tried to order, Shipping was like 30 buck and they have a $100 minimum.

<sigh>

any one buy one from any other vender's?

Try here.

[wd5don]

This is where we just purchased ours:

http://www.voltageconverters.com/itemdesc.asp?ic=VC300J

$29.95 + $10 shipping. Seems to be a decent little unit.

[Ogmeister]

Richard,
I have had this same problem on my ADA8000's occasionally.
It was caused by a faulty capacitor on the input preamp. When this cap failed the op amp went into serious self oscillation.
On mine this would occur when I had the unit on for long periods of time.
Excessive heat was cooking the caps in the circuit.
On one other it would happen if I put pressure on the circuit board around where this cap is. This was a poor solder connection.

Two units that I have started a frying sound on all of the outputs.
Unplugging the unit and restarting would correct this for a while.
I traced this problem down to the clock circuit and found some serious drift of the frequency over time. Replaced the clock circuit and all is good now.

In general these are an excellent value for the money they cost. However the excessive heat built up by the marginally designed power supply is the killer of these units. This heat eventually will change the caps and other heat sensitive components. Due to the budget way this unit is designed it does not take too much of a drift for this to impact the performance.

I can buy these for around 165.00 so I carry two spares in my rig and I have about 10 of them around the warehouse. Doing this has saved my bacon more than once.

Since I built the auto transformers for these to lower the input voltage to around 100 volts there is a lot less heat and I have had no more of these weird failures.

[Yogi]

Sorry. Nonsense was not the best choice of words. I'm sure that it does make a difference. I just think that it's nonsense that it needs to be done in the first place is all.

You are so right Richard. The power supply works fine for European users, the problem is the input transformer and that's why the reduction in voltage is absolutely necessary to make these work well. Considering though that a 40 investment can run up to 6 of these it's not such a bad price for some insurance. It would be great if Behringer realized the poor design but I doubt that's going to happen anytime soon.

[TyRip]

This just makes me feel a little better with spending more of my church's money on the Digimax FS. I know they aren't magically perfect, but Behringer quality control is just not something worth messing with in a system that will already leave the masses skeptical.

I am in the build process, but I hope the safe route I chose will keep us working and reliable.

Decided to go with the E8500 instead of the i5 because the C2D is proven in these systems, and went with Digimax FS all around instead of ADA8000. Let's hope it all works out well.