I worked at a stereo repair/audiophile hand-holding outfit, and we had a test for miniature electrolytic caps we bought in bulk: weigh them. We had an analytical scale that could weigh the difference between Fairy dreams and nightmares; we kept the heaviest 1/3, threw the rest out. The capacitors, not the Fairies! Our theory was that a cap that weighed 2/3 of what it's buddies did is likely already dried out.
The new Jap caps of 30 years ago were all good. They rarely failed in the circuit unless some dumb designer located then within mm of a heat sink. In this case you could nearly always spot them by any bulge on the top.
Hmmm Dell Optiplex'es 775 with really terrible caps that started to fail right after warranty ended.(My school had those , caps started to pop out in 24V rail), there was even lawsuit against Dell about practise using low quality caps
I'm a professional DJ and owned the Behringer XENYX X1222USB mixer, for exactly 2 years, right until I started to get noise and channel dropouts. A month after buying mine, a musician friend bought the exact same model and used it for... yes, you guessed correctly - 2 years! Exactly the same problem - noise and channel dropouts. Built-in obsolescence is a real thing it seems!
I show the date of introduction for the UB1202 as 2005... Wikipedia has the cap plague ending around 2007... so this could be a real cap-plague piece. Suspicious that none of them popped their seals.
I know of an Australian manufacturer of specialised equipment that farmed out some production to China of a product which was normally manufactured locally. Within 6 months to a year they started getting failures - up to 50%. Since the equipment had special warranties and required an electrician to replace it they had to absorb all the replacement costs involved. A very expensive lesson due to poor quality components being substituted in China.
It is not a china related problem. It is cut in cost problem. If they pay the same money for production in china as they pay privileged australian engineers they would get a better quality product for the same price.
@@pahom2 Agreed! China can produce quality products, but, instead, the world comes to them with price bring the most important spec. With price first, second, and third, what you get is crap. Not surprisingly, if China was to build to a technical spec, the cost would be similar to what you'd pay for quality elsewhere in the world. Oddly enough, for China's wealthy, the phrase "Made in USA" is prized, because even they know most of their own national products are best used for wiping.
I've travelled a fair bit to China for work. If caps are being substituted for lower-quality ones it's almost always because the engineers who designed the thing told the CM to chop their cost, not something the CM did of their own volition.
Had a problem with my 1202 and the repair tech I've used over the years said that repairing it would probably cost more than buying a new one as they go for about $120. Another example of our intentionally designed throw-away culture, a culture that is devastating the planet.
Which is why repairing it yourself, if you have the ability and inclination to do so, is the way to go. Deny these manufacturers the business enablement to produce disposable products.
Im 100% with this argument but I also think that old timey machines lasted longer because they were produced for rich costumers and thus were high quality production, nowadays they are produced for the average consumer so they must be lower quality. Thats just part of the problem imo. I bet supercomputers back in the 80s had much more love and care put into them than common PCs nowadays, even if their performance are close
The biggest part of the problem is people keep buying this sh*t. They're creating demand. By buying cheap rubbish, it encourages china to produce even more - and people buy that junk as well. It's a self-perpetuating problem.
@@johnvcougar The trouble with a lot of stuff now is they make it so it can't be repaired. I really enjoy repairing equipment too and have done it now for 40+ years.
“There’s no reason for them to go bad in such a short amount of time” Behringer has consistently pumped out too-good-to-be-true products like this for at least a decade and a half now lmao
Behringer is the Zynga Games of synthesizers: They unapologetically clone and undercut better originals, and parasitically insert themselves in the music production ecosystem with their terrible products too tempting to ignore for musicians on a budget. It all happens in some shady and joyless chinese factory town.
Actually there are two products, which are really nice, not "nice for the buck" but really nice. The DCX2496 Ultra-Drive is good, but be sure to get an old one with PCMCIA-slot, because the guys at the "Ohrenmarke" never learned how to RoHS-solder. And the FBQ100 is a tool i always have around, when a mic makes trouble and you don't want to re-cable the hole FOH.
@@axeman2638 Sometimes you really do get what you are willing to pay. There is a nice small field mixer made by Rolls in the USA rolls.com/products/accessories/mixers There are also the British small mixers like Allen and Heath, only they are manufactured in China. Behringer was one of the very first to be designed in Germany and manufactured in China. The first product of theirs I remember seeing at NAMM was the digital EQ.
Especially the really cheap stuff is just that - cheap and bad even for the price. However I like the Behringer equipment a little bit further up the professional line. Still costs way less than the competitors while being quite good. If you just need a compressor/gate or graph-EQ or a rack-mixer or a (monitoring) headphone amplifier, Behringer is ok in most cases. And there is also stuff that is really great regardless of cost: The Behringer X32 is a great digital mixer, I absolutely love it! It plays up there with the big guys while costing a fraction.
Its so interesting that the sound made from smooth lines is so harsh while that of the "filigreed" shapes sound so pleasant. I understand why, but its a great demonstration of the complexity of music.
I love how interrelated actual sound is to electrical engineering, how a waveform is a waveform regardless of whether it's kept completely inside a circuit (like the Soyuz clock) or exported to a speaker.
I changed hundreds of bad electrolytic caps on Dell motherboards many years ago. No idea if it was true, but the story was that the cap manufacturer hd been sold counterfeit electrolyte. Another bit of kit I had to replace lots of bad caps on was Thompson TV 1530 cameras. We had some when they were very new and after not too long they began developing a fascinating array of faults. After a few sessions of diagnosis and repair, often complicated by their use of thick film hybrid modules which were effectively “black boxes”, we started to realise almost every fault was caused by bad 0.1UF chip capacitors. From then on, we used to play “spot the cap” and analysis of the circuit would usually get us to the culprit pretty quickly.
Substitution with cheap junk is common in Chinese manufacturing. We had a kids hospital here where they found ceiling panels had asbestos put in them despite it being made extremely clear they were to be asbestos free. All had to be cut out and replaced - whilst is was being built.
Yeah, that was an early capacitor plague. Some missing ingredient to suppress hydrogen generation. Part of me thinks Windows Me wasn't actual as bad as reputed, but that it suffered by being the os installed on the machines with flaky caps that created instability. Telltale smell, a bit like maple syrup....
There are write-ups about this on the internet. A Taiwan company stole a formula for Japanese electrolytics, but the stolen version was incomplete, missing one or more key stabilizing ingredients. Dell motherboards used them which subsequently started going bad after a few years. I have some HP SFF machines with bad caps that may have been from the same source. So far haven't got around to replacing them.
Good on you for doing the repair. I threw mine away as for the money it just isn't worth it. But if you've got the time and it's something you enjoy, cool!
Mabye not worth the money to fix and sell. But worth it to save the environment. Or put on eBay for shipping cost “Needs capacitors replaced” Instead of throwing it away. Let someone with less money but lots of free time get some decent equipment for a steal
Even though the caps test as "good", I'd still replace them with nice quality ones for good measure. Electrolytic capacitors are the "secret sauce" for planned obsolescence. I wouldn't be surprised if manufacturers choose the quality to match how long they want the device to last before someone has to buy another one.
I used to work in the pro audio biz and Behringer always had a reputation for ripping off other companies' successful products (yours is a copy of a Mackie 1202) and building them as cheaply as possible. Not surprised at all about the crappy caps!
And I looked the Mackie 1202 up and your are absolutely right, it's a 100% rip-off copy! The design and layout, which is the thing I really like, is not even theirs! Now I am really annoyed.
I bet you wished you'd bought a real mackie 1202 now. How do they get away with it. You would think beringer would get sued by the original company(s) they copy.
@@CuriousMarc I also have a Mackie 1202VLZ that was made many decades ago in the USA. I ran it 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and used it every day. After about 20 years, one of the power supply capacitors failed. I replaced it, and the mixer is good as new. I have used it for personal mixing, as a live sound mixer for small events, as emergency backup for a failed digital sound system, as a supplemental "additional inputs" mixer for a large live sound mixer, for recording, for everything. It's a great little box. The Mackie also requires taking of all of the knobs, but also... there is a locknuts on everything, holding everything solid -- VERY solid. It does take a little patience to open the thing up for servicing! : ) I doubt if the new version of the Mackie are made in the USA, but somehow... I would expect them to have better QC than the Behringer.
Behringer got sued by Mackie in the 90's, also compare their Eurodesk models to the Mackie 8 bus. Also the original truth monitors Vs Mackies. The original truths had horrendous reliability issues too.
I had a very similar problem with a Behringer XENYX 1202FX and re-capping resolved the issue. I am not sure if I would have considered doing that without seeing this video so thank you very much!
Thats why i no longer watch him. His videos take too long for just simple repairs. Get to the point and just get on with it already. i don't need every little detail.
@@simontay4851 unfortunately there's a bunch of content creators on TH-cam who insist on making their videos twice as long as they need to be. I just fast forward. I drag my mouse through the timeline to see when he gets to the juicy stuff and then I just fast forward and listen for the next few minutes and then find the next important part and then listen and watch for a few minutes.
I had missed your original oscilloscope music video, so I watched it (thanks for the link). Holy cow! As a musician and geek, I really enjoyed it. Now I want to get his album, set up my scopes, and watch it while stoned!
To the oscilloscope Music demo: You should try to find a DC coupled (or other way round: not AC coupled) audio source. This REALLY sharpens up everything and provides signals in the way oscilloscope music should look like on the screen as intended by the creator.
Since it's founding, Behringer has always been a company that copies from other manufacturers and aims its products to budget-minded individuals who are looking for the same features you would otherwise have to pay a premium for. Behringer claims to be conceived in Germany, but was one of the first companies to dedicate all of its production in China. As a result they've encountered numerous legal battles with other companies over issues with patents and copyrights. Eventually, they've bought out other professional-grade companies and have, in my opinion, done an injustice to the names these new products are built on. Quality wise, I've always thought of Behringer as the European equivalent of Peavey; it may not sound the best, but it gets the job done.
Indeed. I've owned quite a bit of Behringer gear over the years and it's a trade off between price, features and quality. You get a lot for your money but how long it will last is anybody's guess. For amateur use it's usually more than good enough and long enough lasting for you not to feel ripped off when it packs up. I have a similar mixer to the one in the video and while half of it is either dead or dying there are still enough holes, knobs and twiddly bits working to keep it in service after 15 years. I suspect if I cleaned out the dog hair, nicotine and dust I could get most of it working again... But I can't be bothered.
Oh yeah, just resurrected large Samsung monitor thrown away by a neighbor. Used Nichicon for the re-capping, which basically doubled price of the device on the market right now :) (nobody cares I guess)
Recapping it best for older sets but later models you can sometimes get the whole PSU board at a reasonable price over recapping especially if you are not 100% it is bad caps or it's a BIG sized screen set. Older models tend to be on the rare side when it comes to NOS PSU boards.
That 603 scope is a real thing of beauty. I have an old Eurorack 1602 Mixer that I've had since the late 90's and it's served me well - still going strong, albeit with a couple of scratchy pots.
Wow, I had the same mixer and it failed in the exact same way. Was appalled by the power supply design having a bunch of caps right next to the linear regulators with no cooling.
@cda32• I was just wondering why small computer cooling fans have been eliminated from products like these. And do you think that an external fan would keep components cooler and help them last longer?
@@madmaximilian5783 they should just use some regulators from the modern decade which are lower power and produce less heat. Or have a proper heatsink, they literally try to use the connection jacks as a heatsink
@@cda32 well I guess its its about saving money in production, resulting in short cuts in design and quality. I run a very quiet cooling fan in my recording studio for circulation and it keeps things pretty cool.
Back in high school, I did an internship in one of their contract repair centers in Germany and had to deal with one of these. About 2 mins after plugging it in, the level indicators would start flashing and it would start buzzing like crazy. Quality gear.
I like your synthesizer sounds! I’m gonna keep my eyes out for those CRTs for doing that oscilloscope music with, so I hope that’s a pretty easy feat to accomplish. THANKS A LOT for explaining those ratings, as now I feel oh so much more understanding of the info printed on my electrolytic caps. It might seem second nature to someone else, but I never bothered to read any further than the voltage and farad values, and I never asked what all else it’s telling me! So big THANKS there, that’s valuable info to remember.
I have been using a small Beheringer mixer on my keys rig since 2008. Played hundreds of gigs and the thing worked perfect right up to lockdown. hopefully back next year.
Hi sir i am from indonesia, i am excited with your tool, make me fool about components electronic, i am technician to, must be learn with your chanel, tank you so much.
When you click on the video because you have the same mixer, I’m like no please say it’s not so, I love Behringer and there cheap knock offs but this gave me some knowledge of the cheap crap they use
A reminder that being a Chinese capacitor does not make it a bad capacitor. The issue here is Behringer specifying the cheapest of the cheap caps. Be careful saying “Chinese caps are bad”. Nichicon and Rubycon make “bad” caps too if you buy their 85C 1000hr caps and put them in an environment they weren’t intended for.
Solid State Workshop All good points but the blind anti Chinese made sentiment that ignores the just as bad or worse US made stuff all is caused by the same issue...saving pennies. Bad Chinese supplies are ordered as they come...as cheap as possible. There are plenty of great Chinese products, but they are not the cheapest you can find. Long story longer....you get what you pay for. Both in China and everywhere else.
Jeff Clark but there is a reason for the cheap Chinese reputation. The vast majority of the Chinese stuff is indeed cheap crap. And the vast majority of USA made stuff is made better. Of course there are many exceptions.
The worst Nichihon or Mundorf or else is light yrs better than the worst Chinese capacitor... I know it very well recapping my Studer A68 and Revox C221. Greets from Switzerland.
alphabeets You are right but check the cost difference on average! Trust me I don’t like cheap stuff at all, but just hate that so many times the Chinese get blamed for some European or American company specifying parts *knowing full well* they are crap. Just because you have your stuff made in China doesn’t mean that you can’t control what your thing is made from.
Francis I agree with you that I wish the super super cheap crap never existed so that it *wouldn’t even be an option* to use, but you know everyone’s always trying to scrape the bottom of the barrel
That failure rate is just crazy. How can they stay in business? Edit: I'm talking about the capacitor company... If their caps are so bad, how can they manage to sell them?
Behringer went all in on the price when they moved to china. It's the typical brand kids buy having no money or you buy for a one-off. Their digital stuff is kind of okayish.
By being cheap. they sell LOTS of products by ripping off their designs from other companies, making the SAME product using cheaper components. and by selling them so cheap, they are not worth fixing. so you buy another one and another and another until you finally decide they are not worth it and buy a real product. absolute garbage products! and few if any repair shop will touch them as they are not even worth the basic diagnostic fee
I have a Behringer Xenyx 1002B, and I noticed that the noise floor got higher over the past few years. Thanks for the tip, I might order a kit for it, keep it up!
I repaired old old AMPEX tape recorder by replacing all the power supply caps. I don't have the equipment to do this level of checking. It makes me think I should replace all the caps. It works now with no hum, so maybe leave it as is. What was funny was the power supply push-pull tubes had to be replaced. I replaced them with Russian tubes as they had the best reputation for modern replacement tubs. The punch line is that this particular recorder was used by the US Navy to record diplomatic parties during the Cold War.
I think that the moral of the story here is this. Don't buy Behringer's garbage. I bought a Xenyx Q802 USB about a decade ago. The left channel wasn't working so I opened it to see if it was something relatively easy to fix. Lowe and behold there's a nut from one of the ¼" Jack's wedged up against the left output grounding it to the neighboring ground pin of a nearby jack. I have a picture of it as I discovered it if you're interested. This was fortuitous because one of the nuts they used was cross threaded so it served as a replacement for the fouled one. That's not even to mention the PA speakers where I discovered that they had repaired some miss-cut port holes by filling it up with hot glue. I found this as I was replacing blown drivers which were rated at about a quarter of the power rating on the cabinet. The iNuke DSP 3000 I got from them came with the wires of the power switch disconnected internally. There was a matching amp which was missing it's fuse. I didn't buy them used. They came that way new. What bothered me most was the 250 watt drivers in a 2k watt cabinet and not even in series with the other one in the same cabinet. I'll never buy Behringer's product again. Id suggest Yamaha or Mackie for about the same price. You'll be much happier with either of those.
Hah, I have this exact same mixer and it was never great and became unusably noisy after not all that much usage... Upgraded a long time ago, but kind of tempted to re-cap it now and revive it!
@@monad_tcp on the contrary, almost all of Behringer's products are cheaper clones of other company's wares. They just ride on the reputation of being German, and then the fact that others bought them.
Had the smaller version of this giving off the magic smoke on the regulators. Replaced those, new smoke comes out. Now that I have seen that it can be any/all of the numerous caps, I will just harvest the knobs and trash the thing. Thanks!
Stark, irrefutable evidence of the difference between GOOD equipment made by manufacturers who CARE about quality and are not afraid to CHARGE THE CONSUMER the little extra that GOOD quality will cost. I guess my next mixer will be a Yamaha, or similar. One can remain hopeful that they will source high grade components for their designs.
"It's going to be pretty annoying if we have to remove all these knobs." Exactly what I said when I had to replace boards on a 32 channel Yamaha console. 17 knobs and a fader per input, I think I only replaced the boards for 16 channels. A nightmare...
I got a second hand behringer xenyx 1222fx mixer for a great price it was only 2 or 3 years old and it blew up a few days after i bought it from a person. But i fixed it for few bucks i just replaced switching transistor/ic , rectifier and optocoupler in the power supply. Now it works perfectly. Only letdown of that mixer was a freaking switching power supply. If it blows again i am going to make external power supply with proper transformers and regulators.
caps in such low power devices wont bulge, to make them bulge they need to get hot. when their esr increases, they lose more energy to heat, which evaporates / boils the electrolyte causing them to bulge, dry out and esr increase even more. usually they wont leak either, they just dry out over time. even new old stock caps from this era might be bad allready without even seeing a second of use.
Yay! Another from Marc! I have to deal with these mixers all the time... can't wait to see what's up! Thanks! [Yep -- I've had to replace power supply caps in Behringer mixers. Not a big surprise. I wonder how many big names rebrand these devices, there are many with the exact form factor, just different case/hardware.] Best Lissajous curves I've ever seen.
Great content and information. Might I suggest a COB LED for zooming in on the capacitor details. This would show a better image on camera and no shadows on the images. Keep the videos coming.
I've had two Behringer mixing desks that have been on the road and run great for at least 7 years each... Can't complain for the money! Eventually you start losing channels and function, but honestly, they've been great...
I just finished replacing the caps in my Sanyo Walkman. Some of them were completely dead, but almost all of them were more than 20% out of spec, and had a high ESR. Portable electronics from the 80s/90s seem to be vulnerable to bad caps, I suppose from the heat in the small enclosures. But I agree with you that blanket replacing of caps should not be they way you repair things. In fact, the walkman also had a bad volume switch, and that took some time to diagnose. It was an unusual volume knob with both left and right actuation. One of the two sides was tied into the motor circuit.
Speaking of the importance of quality caps, I took the main filtering caps out of a 1996 Alpine V12 car amplifier, they are alpine branded 50v 5600uf snap-in caps and one has a v loss of 1.3% still has 5643uf and an esr of .02, the other has a v loss of 1.2% 5821uf and an esr of .03. They have outlived most of the other components on the amp.
I only use Panasonic 10,000 hour larger sized EB or FM (low ESR applications) when electrolytics are necessary in my designs. Everything 47uF and under is film or ceramic.
I find that you can't reliably test capacitors after they have been removed from the board. Often the heat of desoldering will temporarily reform them.
The main filter cap failed on my friend's Behringer MX602A mixer. He said, "Here, it's yours". I replaced it with a decent Japanese cap for a couple bucks. Still going strong 10 years later.
I also have the UB1202 and it failed after about two years. Two OP amps had gone south so I had no sound output. Quite easy fix and it has been working since. Only cost me the price of the OP amps as I did the repair myself. This was 15 years ago so maybe I should replace the caps. :)
Hmmmm and they seem so attractively priced too!!! - I use 2 of the other Behringer models - one is problematic with it's USB and the other introduces quite a bit of hum into my audio - that's a lot of capacitors to remove and check/replace. Great video and probably a look into the future for one of my mixers.
Been trying to get oscilloscope music running on my Picoscope but not real time enough - I'll have to get my old analogue scope out.... Good point on capacitors. Steer clear of unknowns. I also didn't realise that fake components were such an issue in the market.
I have a Xenyx 10 channel I bought in 2008, used it almost everyday since then with no issues at all... except I did clean the main slider once to get dust and dirt out.
The story I heard was everyone wanted smaller cap in size but the same cap value. The cap industry jumped. The liquid was changed to obtain the higher rating but it also ended up being corrosive and leaked. Or the sales guy said we need more 15 v caps... just remark the 12 v one and sell them.
On a related note my Tektronix TDS-220 scope from over 20 years ago is working fine with no repairs of any kind. It is possible to build quality, but price points seem to be the norm instead. To date it, it supports hardcopy printout directly to Epson 9 or 24 pin dot matrix printers using a centronics parallel port with the optional communications module. Will also print to a Thinkjet, Deskjet, or original Laserjet by HP, if you still have one. This is pre USB, so no saving traces to a thumb drive.
Great video and discussion on capacitor life/temp. ratings. Electrolytic capacitors to me have always been a necessary evil. By their very nature they have a finite life regardless of their quality and heat accelerates their demise.
I’ve had two Behringer mixers, one failed because I plugged it into 240V... maybe I killed the power adapter but I didn’t have a way to check. The other still works, but I did manage to zap its USB port with a fake Apple plug. Both cost $100 so I can’t bring myself to care.
Now THATS a BAD filter - WOW! I just changed 4 Xunda caps in my (new to me) Eurorack "UB2442FX-PRO" power supply. This time all 4 have burst vents. (2 25v 1000uf and 2 16v 470 uf). This replaced a Fostex mixer so it's a step up; but I want to replace all the caps before something else goes wrong.
Oh geez I had to do the same to one of those mixers. I also replaced some of the supposedly noisey opamps but that got only partially rid of the waterfall. So the noise problem seems to be related to the potentiometers and resistors.
I have a real Mackie 1202 that also died due to capacitor problems, though I encountered something new - several of the electrolytics had failed short. I'm used to them failing open... very odd.
Now to be fair, this mixer is 10+ years old and these things are among the cheapest you can get for a given feature set. You get what you pay for, in this case cheap caps sourced locally in China - which I suspect may have been problematic from day one. Has noise improved now? Having played with a newer Xenyx Q1002USB, I didn't find it to be particularly problematic, although the mic input definitely missed its EIN spec (supposedly -134 dBu shorted, my estimate was -126 dBu shorted = -124.8 dB @ 150 ohm, quite consistently for both inputs - presumably the input transistors don't have rbb' nearly as low as they should, perhaps due to switching suppliers; it's certainly not typical for the whole company, as Julian Krause found plenty good 150 ohm EIN even on their cheapest USB audio interface, the UM2). Yes, my current Mackie 402 VLZ4 will get about 4.5 dB lower mix bus noise, its preamp distortion remains negligible even near max gain, and I think peak internal level handling is more like +22 dBu instead of +16 dBu. Still, you should be able to get plenty decent dynamic range through the Behringer if you get the gain staging right. For a nominal 2 Vrms / +8 dBu peak output (roughly 1 V/div), I would recommend the following settings: Channel level ~ 0 dB (adjust input gain accordingly) Main mix ~ -10 dB Reduce main mix if you need less. BTW, I don't know how you're getting the signal out of the PC in the first place, but if it's an unbalanced output I hope you soldered the XLR cables yourself. Otherwise you will not be getting the benefits of the balanced input at all. If both the signal source and the mixer output side are *grounded:* unbalanced signal --> red wire --> XLR pin 2 unbalanced ground --> blue wire --> XLR pin 3 Cable shield should connect *either* to unbalanced ground *or* XLR pin 1, I just keep forgetting which one was the better of the two. If either side is *floating:* unbalanced signal --> red wire --> XLR pin 2 unbalanced ground --> blue wire --> XLR pin 3 unbalanced ground (2) --> shield --> XLR pin 1 This cable _may_ work just as well in a "both sides grounded" scenario but it somewhat depends on XLR pin 1 routing within the device, so YMMV. (A mixer introduced in 2002 may very well not be AES48-2005 compliant. A schematic for the smaller UB802 is out there, and that shows pin 1 going straight to AGND with no dedicated chassis ground in sight, so seemingly not compliant.)
They designed that device to break 3 days off warranty and then you were supposed to buy another one, fixing it amounts to theft, you might as well have grabbed one at the store and ran away with it! ; )
I have the american made Mackie 1202 (what Behringer basically ripped off), made in the 80s, and that thing actually does need to be recapped. I just haven't felt like taking it apart and doing it.
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I worked at a stereo repair/audiophile hand-holding outfit, and we had a test for miniature electrolytic caps we bought in bulk: weigh them.
We had an analytical scale that could weigh the difference between Fairy dreams and nightmares; we kept the heaviest 1/3, threw the rest out. The capacitors, not the Fairies!
Our theory was that a cap that weighed 2/3 of what it's buddies did is likely already dried out.
The new Jap caps of 30 years ago were all good. They rarely failed in the circuit unless some dumb designer located then within mm of a heat sink. In this case you could nearly always spot them by any bulge on the top.
Searching Eurorack UB1202 on google, this video now appears on the front page of search results.
Well done
capacitors are the perfect components to build planned-obsolete devices. Manufacturers choose the brand based on the required "timing".
Wouldnt surprice me if one day i find one that on the side says Hrs instead of uF
@@laharl2k Most caps come with an expected lifetime
@@laharl2k
that would be very kind of them!
Hmmm Dell Optiplex'es 775 with really terrible caps that started to fail right after warranty ended.(My school had those , caps started to pop out in 24V rail), there was even lawsuit against Dell about
practise using low quality caps
@@mikcnmvedmsfonoteka There is no such voltage level in any PC...
I'm a professional DJ and owned the Behringer XENYX X1222USB mixer, for exactly 2 years, right until I started to get noise and channel dropouts. A month after buying mine, a musician friend bought the exact same model and used it for... yes, you guessed correctly - 2 years! Exactly the same problem - noise and channel dropouts. Built-in obsolescence is a real thing it seems!
I show the date of introduction for the UB1202 as 2005... Wikipedia has the cap plague ending around 2007... so this could be a real cap-plague piece. Suspicious that none of them popped their seals.
You can repurpose all those Chinese capacitors as resistors!
They probably aren't linear enough.
lol Might as well.
Or smoke machine
You might be able to poison fish with them if you dump them in the river.
They will have an audiovisual overload alert system
I know of an Australian manufacturer of specialised equipment that farmed out some production to China of a product which was normally manufactured locally. Within 6 months to a year they started getting failures - up to 50%. Since the equipment had special warranties and required an electrician to replace it they had to absorb all the replacement costs involved. A very expensive lesson due to poor quality components being substituted in China.
It is not a china related problem. It is cut in cost problem. If they pay the same money for production in china as they pay privileged australian engineers they would get a better quality product for the same price.
@@pahom2 Agreed! China can produce quality products, but, instead, the world comes to them with price bring the most important spec. With price first, second, and third, what you get is crap. Not surprisingly, if China was to build to a technical spec, the cost would be similar to what you'd pay for quality elsewhere in the world. Oddly enough, for China's wealthy, the phrase "Made in USA" is prized, because even they know most of their own national products are best used for wiping.
@@geocam2 the only achievement australian workers endured is being born in australia. If they loose a fair competition to chineese workers then ok.
@@geocam2 go cry to your mummy snowflake
I've travelled a fair bit to China for work. If caps are being substituted for lower-quality ones it's almost always because the engineers who designed the thing told the CM to chop their cost, not something the CM did of their own volition.
Had a problem with my 1202 and the repair tech I've used over the years said that repairing it would probably cost more than buying a new one as they go for about $120. Another example of our intentionally designed throw-away culture, a culture that is devastating the planet.
Which is why repairing it yourself, if you have the ability and inclination to do so, is the way to go. Deny these manufacturers the business enablement to produce disposable products.
Im 100% with this argument but I also think that old timey machines lasted longer because they were produced for rich costumers and thus were high quality production, nowadays they are produced for the average consumer so they must be lower quality. Thats just part of the problem imo.
I bet supercomputers back in the 80s had much more love and care put into them than common PCs nowadays, even if their performance are close
The biggest part of the problem is people keep buying this sh*t. They're creating demand. By buying cheap rubbish, it encourages china to produce even more - and people buy that junk as well. It's a self-perpetuating problem.
I fix it instead. That way I avoid buying more crap. Plus, it's fun!
@@johnvcougar The trouble with a lot of stuff now is they make it so it can't be repaired. I really enjoy repairing equipment too and have done it now for 40+ years.
“There’s no reason for them to go bad in such a short amount of time” Behringer has consistently pumped out too-good-to-be-true products like this for at least a decade and a half now lmao
Behringer is the Zynga Games of synthesizers: They unapologetically clone and undercut better originals, and parasitically insert themselves in the music production ecosystem with their terrible products too tempting to ignore for musicians on a budget. It all happens in some shady and joyless chinese factory town.
Guilty by Association ? LOL Guilty of Living longer then expected.
Guilty of being from the same brand.
@@bloguetronica Precisely!
Oh my. This is why many sound engineers have "no Behringer" in their Technical Riders ...
i got burned, won't ever touch their garbage again
Best avoid Midas as well then... they're the same company now.
Actually there are two products, which are really nice, not "nice for the buck" but really nice. The DCX2496 Ultra-Drive is good, but be sure to get an old one with PCMCIA-slot, because the guys at the "Ohrenmarke" never learned how to RoHS-solder. And the FBQ100 is a tool i always have around, when a mic makes trouble and you don't want to re-cable the hole FOH.
@@axeman2638 Sometimes you really do get what you are willing to pay.
There is a nice small field mixer made by Rolls in the USA
rolls.com/products/accessories/mixers
There are also the British small mixers like Allen and Heath, only they are manufactured in China.
Behringer was one of the very first to be designed in Germany and manufactured in China. The first product of theirs I remember seeing at NAMM was the digital EQ.
Especially the really cheap stuff is just that - cheap and bad even for the price.
However I like the Behringer equipment a little bit further up the professional line. Still costs way less than the competitors while being quite good. If you just need a compressor/gate or graph-EQ or a rack-mixer or a (monitoring) headphone amplifier, Behringer is ok in most cases.
And there is also stuff that is really great regardless of cost: The Behringer X32 is a great digital mixer, I absolutely love it! It plays up there with the big guys while costing a fraction.
Its so interesting that the sound made from smooth lines is so harsh while that of the "filigreed" shapes sound so pleasant. I understand why, but its a great demonstration of the complexity of music.
I love how interrelated actual sound is to electrical engineering, how a waveform is a waveform regardless of whether it's kept completely inside a circuit (like the Soyuz clock) or exported to a speaker.
I changed hundreds of bad electrolytic caps on Dell motherboards many years ago. No idea if it was true, but the story was that the cap manufacturer hd been sold counterfeit electrolyte. Another bit of kit I had to replace lots of bad caps on was Thompson TV 1530 cameras. We had some when they were very new and after not too long they began developing a fascinating array of faults. After a few sessions of diagnosis and repair, often complicated by their use of thick film hybrid modules which were effectively “black boxes”, we started to realise almost every fault was caused by bad 0.1UF chip capacitors. From then on, we used to play “spot the cap” and analysis of the circuit would usually get us to the culprit pretty quickly.
Substitution with cheap junk is common in Chinese manufacturing. We had a kids hospital here where they found ceiling panels had asbestos put in them despite it being made extremely clear they were to be asbestos free. All had to be cut out and replaced - whilst is was being built.
Yeah, that was an early capacitor plague. Some missing ingredient to suppress hydrogen generation. Part of me thinks Windows Me wasn't actual as bad as reputed, but that it suffered by being the os installed on the machines with flaky caps that created instability. Telltale smell, a bit like maple syrup....
@@Spookieham by "here" you mean where?
There are write-ups about this on the internet. A Taiwan company stole a formula for Japanese electrolytics, but the stolen version was incomplete, missing one or more key stabilizing ingredients. Dell motherboards used them which subsequently started going bad after a few years. I have some HP SFF machines with bad caps that may have been from the same source. So far haven't got around to replacing them.
Good on you for doing the repair. I threw mine away as for the money it just isn't worth it. But if you've got the time and it's something you enjoy, cool!
we should park in front of you, orherwise you can not post videos! see, you are now famous!
Mabye not worth the money to fix and sell. But worth it to save the environment. Or put on eBay for shipping cost “Needs capacitors replaced” Instead of throwing it away. Let someone with less money but lots of free time get some decent equipment for a steal
I love the contrast the title 'Modern Tech Fails" gives with all the retro tech you have on your channel.
Even though the caps test as "good", I'd still replace them with nice quality ones for good measure.
Electrolytic capacitors are the "secret sauce" for planned obsolescence. I wouldn't be surprised if manufacturers choose the quality to match how long they want the device to last before someone has to buy another one.
One would believe they do so intentionally, yes. I can only imagine how much otherwise perfectly fine electronic devices have been thrown out :(
I used to work in the pro audio biz and Behringer always had a reputation for ripping off other companies' successful products (yours is a copy of a Mackie 1202) and building them as cheaply as possible. Not surprised at all about the crappy caps!
And I looked the Mackie 1202 up and your are absolutely right, it's a 100% rip-off copy! The design and layout, which is the thing I really like, is not even theirs! Now I am really annoyed.
I bet you wished you'd bought a real mackie 1202 now. How do they get away with it. You would think beringer would get sued by the original company(s) they copy.
I’ve got a Mackie 1202 that I got back in the mid 90s.pulled it out a few weeks ago for a project and it still works great!
@@CuriousMarc I also have a Mackie 1202VLZ that was made many decades ago in the USA. I ran it 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and used it every day. After about 20 years, one of the power supply capacitors failed. I replaced it, and the mixer is good as new. I have used it for personal mixing, as a live sound mixer for small events, as emergency backup for a failed digital sound system, as a supplemental "additional inputs" mixer for a large live sound mixer, for recording, for everything. It's a great little box.
The Mackie also requires taking of all of the knobs, but also... there is a locknuts on everything, holding everything solid -- VERY solid. It does take a little patience to open the thing up for servicing! : )
I doubt if the new version of the Mackie are made in the USA, but somehow... I would expect them to have better QC than the Behringer.
Behringer got sued by Mackie in the 90's, also compare their Eurodesk models to the Mackie 8 bus. Also the original truth monitors Vs Mackies. The original truths had horrendous reliability issues too.
I had a very similar problem with a Behringer XENYX 1202FX and re-capping resolved the issue. I am not sure if I would have considered doing that without seeing this video so thank you very much!
Sweet, I’m glad this was helpful. That was the goal of the video.
Blindfolded! That made my night.
All the capacitor tests makes me wanna hear Mr. Carlson's voice :)
"Hi there!"
Yes, but Carlson would have made this a three-hour video. Let's thank CuriousMarc for getting the job done in just 16 minutes.
@@bruce.malmat9999 He might have talked about outside foil if the caps in this repair weren't all polarized electrolytics.
Thats why i no longer watch him. His videos take too long for just simple repairs. Get to the point and just get on with it already. i don't need every little detail.
@@simontay4851 unfortunately there's a bunch of content creators on TH-cam who insist on making their videos twice as long as they need to be. I just fast forward. I drag my mouse through the timeline to see when he gets to the juicy stuff and then I just fast forward and listen for the next few minutes and then find the next important part and then listen and watch for a few minutes.
I had missed your original oscilloscope music video, so I watched it (thanks for the link).
Holy cow!
As a musician and geek, I really enjoyed it. Now I want to get his album, set up my scopes, and watch it while stoned!
To the oscilloscope Music demo: You should try to find a DC coupled (or other way round: not AC coupled) audio source. This REALLY sharpens up everything and provides signals in the way oscilloscope music should look like on the screen as intended by the creator.
I really like the soft relay switching noise that your HP LCR meter makes.
I have an old Behringer Eurodesk MX8000 from the end of the 90's and it works flawless. Different song for todays Behringer.
I love the tear down of the good and bad caps
Since it's founding, Behringer has always been a company that copies from other manufacturers and aims its products to budget-minded individuals who are looking for the same features you would otherwise have to pay a premium for. Behringer claims to be conceived in Germany, but was one of the first companies to dedicate all of its production in China. As a result they've encountered numerous legal battles with other companies over issues with patents and copyrights. Eventually, they've bought out other professional-grade companies and have, in my opinion, done an injustice to the names these new products are built on. Quality wise, I've always thought of Behringer as the European equivalent of Peavey; it may not sound the best, but it gets the job done.
Indeed. I've owned quite a bit of Behringer gear over the years and it's a trade off between price, features and quality. You get a lot for your money but how long it will last is anybody's guess. For amateur use it's usually more than good enough and long enough lasting for you not to feel ripped off when it packs up.
I have a similar mixer to the one in the video and while half of it is either dead or dying there are still enough holes, knobs and twiddly bits working to keep it in service after 15 years. I suspect if I cleaned out the dog hair, nicotine and dust I could get most of it working again... But I can't be bothered.
Oh yeah, just resurrected large Samsung monitor thrown away by a neighbor. Used Nichicon for the re-capping, which basically doubled price of the device on the market right now :) (nobody cares I guess)
Recapping it best for older sets but later models you can sometimes get the whole PSU board at a reasonable price over recapping especially if you are not 100% it is bad caps or it's a BIG sized screen set. Older models tend to be on the rare side when it comes to NOS PSU boards.
Herr Bert from the furure appreciates the repair video. His Behringer will break eventually, too
All our behringers will break, eventually.
VectorKappa only People with low life expectancy and no heirs should buy Behringer.
@@AndreasDelleske I'm bald and 67. I thank you for your warning. :)
That 603 scope is a real thing of beauty.
I have an old Eurorack 1602 Mixer that I've had since the late 90's and it's served me well - still going strong, albeit with a couple of scratchy pots.
caps are the bain of my old computer collection as well!
Wow, I had the same mixer and it failed in the exact same way. Was appalled by the power supply design having a bunch of caps right next to the linear regulators with no cooling.
@cda32• I was just wondering why small computer cooling fans have been eliminated from products like these.
And do you think that an external fan would keep components cooler and help them last longer?
@@madmaximilian5783 they should just use some regulators from the modern decade which are lower power and produce less heat. Or have a proper heatsink, they literally try to use the connection jacks as a heatsink
@@cda32 well I guess its its about saving money in production, resulting in short cuts in design and quality.
I run a very quiet cooling fan in my recording studio for circulation and it keeps things pretty cool.
Back in high school, I did an internship in one of their contract repair centers in Germany and had to deal with one of these. About 2 mins after plugging it in, the level indicators would start flashing and it would start buzzing like crazy. Quality gear.
Yes Marc, you have to remove ALL the knobs....
I like your synthesizer sounds! I’m gonna keep my eyes out for those CRTs for doing that oscilloscope music with, so I hope that’s a pretty easy feat to accomplish. THANKS A LOT for explaining those ratings, as now I feel oh so much more understanding of the info printed on my electrolytic caps. It might seem second nature to someone else, but I never bothered to read any further than the voltage and farad values, and I never asked what all else it’s telling me! So big THANKS there, that’s valuable info to remember.
You could take apart and old 15 inch CRT TV and connect the deflection coils to an amplifier.
I have been using a small Beheringer mixer on my keys rig since 2008. Played hundreds of gigs and the thing worked perfect right up to lockdown. hopefully back next year.
Hi sir i am from indonesia, i am excited with your tool, make me fool about components electronic, i am technician to, must be learn with your chanel, tank you so much.
When you click on the video because you have the same mixer, I’m like no please say it’s not so, I love Behringer and there cheap knock offs but this gave me some knowledge of the cheap crap they use
A reminder that being a Chinese capacitor does not make it a bad capacitor. The issue here is Behringer specifying the cheapest of the cheap caps. Be careful saying “Chinese caps are bad”. Nichicon and Rubycon make “bad” caps too if you buy their 85C 1000hr caps and put them in an environment they weren’t intended for.
Solid State Workshop All good points but the blind anti Chinese made sentiment that ignores the just as bad or worse US made stuff all is caused by the same issue...saving pennies. Bad Chinese supplies are ordered as they come...as cheap as possible. There are plenty of great Chinese products, but they are not the cheapest you can find. Long story longer....you get what you pay for. Both in China and everywhere else.
Jeff Clark but there is a reason for the cheap Chinese reputation. The vast majority of the Chinese stuff is indeed cheap crap. And the vast majority of USA made stuff is made better. Of course there are many exceptions.
The worst Nichihon or Mundorf or else is light yrs better than the worst Chinese capacitor... I know it very well recapping my Studer A68 and Revox C221.
Greets from Switzerland.
alphabeets You are right but check the cost difference on average! Trust me I don’t like cheap stuff at all, but just hate that so many times the Chinese get blamed for some European or American company specifying parts *knowing full well* they are crap. Just because you have your stuff made in China doesn’t mean that you can’t control what your thing is made from.
Francis I agree with you that I wish the super super cheap crap never existed so that it *wouldn’t even be an option* to use, but you know everyone’s always trying to scrape the bottom of the barrel
Ah Behringer. I immediately knew where this was going as soon as I read the name.
Cathartic vids by Marc - recapping meditation is a ‘thing’ 🧘🏻♂️
That failure rate is just crazy. How can they stay in business?
Edit: I'm talking about the capacitor company... If their caps are so bad, how can they manage to sell them?
Behringer went all in on the price when they moved to china. It's the typical brand kids buy having no money or you buy for a one-off. Their digital stuff is kind of okayish.
By being very cheap.
As long as it fails after a years warranty they don't care.
A lot of functionality for hslf or a third of the price. But less good on audio quality and general quality. Nice for practice or a new band.
By being cheap. they sell LOTS of products by ripping off their designs from other companies, making the SAME product using cheaper components. and by selling them so cheap, they are not worth fixing. so you buy another one and another and another until you finally decide they are not worth it and buy a real product. absolute garbage products! and few if any repair shop will touch them as they are not even worth the basic diagnostic fee
I have a Behringer Xenyx 1002B, and I noticed that the noise floor got higher over the past few years. Thanks for the tip, I might order a kit for it, keep it up!
I just got rid of my digital radio with a similar problem and i realized i did not check other caps after I changed filter caps :(
Спасибо за великолепные музыкальные эффекты. Да и видео самого ремонта всегда завораживают.
At first I thought that was some kind if micro impact wrench. My mind was like.. what the hell? lol.. oh.. it's the loud pump.
I have absolutley no idea what you are talking about, but I like it!
Yes, but can your oscilloscope music spell "Techmoan" ?
Wow, I didn't know the fail rate for the different temp ratings was SO dramatic! I think I'll stop pinching pennies. Thanks, mate!
Yeah, always buy 105C Japanese high quality caps.
Awsome video. Loved the visualization of sound.
Genuine Crapacitors.
They appeared on much more expensive equipment too.
That could be an Ave-ism. The Chinesium Crapacitor :-)
Genuine Scrapacitors.
I repaired old old AMPEX tape recorder by replacing all the power supply caps. I don't have the equipment to do this level of checking. It makes me think I should replace all the caps. It works now with no hum, so maybe leave it as is. What was funny was the power supply push-pull tubes had to be replaced. I replaced them with Russian tubes as they had the best reputation for modern replacement tubs. The punch line is that this particular recorder was used by the US Navy to record diplomatic parties during the Cold War.
I think that the moral of the story here is this. Don't buy Behringer's garbage. I bought a Xenyx Q802 USB about a decade ago. The left channel wasn't working so I opened it to see if it was something relatively easy to fix. Lowe and behold there's a nut from one of the ¼" Jack's wedged up against the left output grounding it to the neighboring ground pin of a nearby jack. I have a picture of it as I discovered it if you're interested. This was fortuitous because one of the nuts they used was cross threaded so it served as a replacement for the fouled one. That's not even to mention the PA speakers where I discovered that they had repaired some miss-cut port holes by filling it up with hot glue. I found this as I was replacing blown drivers which were rated at about a quarter of the power rating on the cabinet. The iNuke DSP 3000 I got from them came with the wires of the power switch disconnected internally. There was a matching amp which was missing it's fuse. I didn't buy them used. They came that way new. What bothered me most was the 250 watt drivers in a 2k watt cabinet and not even in series with the other one in the same cabinet. I'll never buy Behringer's product again. Id suggest Yamaha or Mackie for about the same price. You'll be much happier with either of those.
Hah, I have this exact same mixer and it was never great and became unusably noisy after not all that much usage... Upgraded a long time ago, but kind of tempted to re-cap it now and revive it!
Thankyou for all the wonderful content Curiousmarc!!!
👍
Nothing screams 'built to a price' like those caps...
It's scary to think just how much stuff there is waiting to fail out there.
@@ewetoo with the owner thinking, "that was junk, not buying that brand again". Ends up with something else but also uses the cheap crud components.
I‘m deaf by now.
We used to say that about General Electric..
@@monad_tcp on the contrary, almost all of Behringer's products are cheaper clones of other company's wares. They just ride on the reputation of being German, and then the fact that others bought them.
Had the smaller version of this giving off the magic smoke on the regulators. Replaced those, new smoke comes out. Now that I have seen that it can be any/all of the numerous caps, I will just harvest the knobs and trash the thing. Thanks!
Stark, irrefutable evidence of the difference between GOOD equipment made by manufacturers who CARE about quality and are not afraid to CHARGE THE CONSUMER the little extra that GOOD quality will cost. I guess my next mixer will be a Yamaha, or similar. One can remain hopeful that they will source high grade components for their designs.
"It's going to be pretty annoying if we have to remove all these knobs." Exactly what I said when I had to replace boards on a 32 channel Yamaha console. 17 knobs and a fader per input, I think I only replaced the boards for 16 channels. A nightmare...
Makes me want to take apart my Behringer and replace all the caps in advance...
or throw it away and buy the original it was copied from.
@@htroberts hear hear
Loving your occiliscope music
I got a second hand behringer xenyx 1222fx mixer for a great price it was only 2 or 3 years old and it blew up a few days after i bought it from a person. But i fixed it for few bucks i just replaced switching transistor/ic , rectifier and optocoupler in the power supply. Now it works perfectly. Only letdown of that mixer was a freaking switching power supply. If it blows again i am going to make external power supply with proper transformers and regulators.
caps in such low power devices wont bulge, to make them bulge they need to get hot. when their esr increases, they lose more energy to heat, which evaporates / boils the electrolyte causing them to bulge, dry out and esr increase even more. usually they wont leak either, they just dry out over time. even new old stock caps from this era might be bad allready without even seeing a second of use.
Yay! Another from Marc! I have to deal with these mixers all the time... can't wait to see what's up! Thanks! [Yep -- I've had to replace power supply caps in Behringer mixers. Not a big surprise. I wonder how many big names rebrand these devices, there are many with the exact form factor, just different case/hardware.] Best Lissajous curves I've ever seen.
Sounds like they ripped off the others form factor actually.
Great content and information. Might I suggest a COB LED for zooming in on the capacitor details. This would show a better image on camera and no shadows on the images. Keep the videos coming.
theres a good reason why a lot of my muso mates and myself dont like behringer
I've had two Behringer mixing desks that have been on the road and run great for at least 7 years each... Can't complain for the money! Eventually you start losing channels and function, but honestly, they've been great...
3:15 just a side note, one was a 7915. The 78xx series is positive voltage regulator and the 79xx series is negative
I just finished replacing the caps in my Sanyo Walkman. Some of them were completely dead, but almost all of them were more than 20% out of spec, and had a high ESR. Portable electronics from the 80s/90s seem to be vulnerable to bad caps, I suppose from the heat in the small enclosures. But I agree with you that blanket replacing of caps should not be they way you repair things. In fact, the walkman also had a bad volume switch, and that took some time to diagnose. It was an unusual volume knob with both left and right actuation. One of the two sides was tied into the motor circuit.
Speaking of the importance of quality caps, I took the main filtering caps out of a 1996 Alpine V12 car amplifier, they are alpine branded 50v 5600uf snap-in caps and one has a v loss of 1.3% still has 5643uf and an esr of .02, the other has a v loss of 1.2% 5821uf and an esr of .03. They have outlived most of the other components on the amp.
Oh wow! I feel your pain. All those capacitors, well at least you shouldn't have any more problems any time soon!
Next repair video will be the desoldering station. It got to its lifetime operating hours in just this one video...
Let's hope it not Chinese 😂😃lol
I only use Panasonic 10,000 hour larger sized EB or FM (low ESR applications) when electrolytics are necessary in my designs. Everything 47uF and under is film or ceramic.
I stick with Panasonic and Rubycon for electrolytics, I like my recons to outlast the original "infallible German engineering".
Cool channel!! Just now climbing aboard. Gotta go back and watch everything now.
Man, i want a whole hour of the last minutes of this video! 😎
😄 so true! Exactly my wish.
I find that you can't reliably test capacitors after they have been removed from the board. Often the heat of desoldering will temporarily reform them.
That would make sense. I haven't thought of that before
The main filter cap failed on my friend's Behringer MX602A mixer. He said, "Here, it's yours". I replaced it with a decent Japanese cap for a couple bucks. Still going strong 10 years later.
I also have the UB1202 and it failed after about two years. Two OP amps had gone south so I had no sound output.
Quite easy fix and it has been working since. Only cost me the price of the OP amps as I did the repair myself.
This was 15 years ago so maybe I should replace the caps. :)
Hmmmm and they seem so attractively priced too!!! - I use 2 of the other Behringer models - one is problematic with it's USB and the other introduces quite a bit of hum into my audio - that's a lot of capacitors to remove and check/replace. Great video and probably a look into the future for one of my mixers.
Been trying to get oscilloscope music running on my Picoscope but not real time enough - I'll have to get my old analogue scope out....
Good point on capacitors. Steer clear of unknowns. I also didn't realise that fake components were such an issue in the market.
I have a Xenyx 10 channel I bought in 2008, used it almost everyday since then with no issues at all... except I did clean the main slider once to get dust and dirt out.
1:43 we have to have fun in these crazy times eh Marc :)
the oscope music visualization is so cool!!! thanks for posting such neat content!
The story I heard was everyone wanted smaller cap in size but the same cap value. The cap industry jumped. The liquid was changed to obtain the higher rating but it also ended up being corrosive and leaked. Or the sales guy said we need more 15 v caps... just remark the 12 v one and sell them.
I really love your channel and I appreciate you making the videos that you do!
On a related note my Tektronix TDS-220 scope from over 20 years ago is working fine with no repairs of any kind. It is possible to build quality, but price points seem to be the norm instead. To date it, it supports hardcopy printout directly to Epson 9 or 24 pin dot matrix printers using a centronics parallel port with the optional communications module. Will also print to a Thinkjet, Deskjet, or original Laserjet by HP, if you still have one. This is pre USB, so no saving traces to a thumb drive.
Great video and discussion on capacitor life/temp. ratings. Electrolytic capacitors to me have always been a necessary evil. By their very nature they have a finite life regardless of their quality and heat accelerates their demise.
I’ve had two Behringer mixers, one failed because I plugged it into 240V... maybe I killed the power adapter but I didn’t have a way to check.
The other still works, but I did manage to zap its USB port with a fake Apple plug.
Both cost $100 so I can’t bring myself to care.
The final representations of the sounds on an oscilloscope are beautiful! how did you get them?
Thanks so much
Link in the video description, but let me put it again here: oscilloscopemusic.com/
Behringer failed since they released their high powered mixer. The old Behringer still the best!
Now THATS a BAD filter - WOW!
I just changed 4 Xunda caps in my (new to me) Eurorack "UB2442FX-PRO" power supply. This time all 4 have burst vents. (2 25v 1000uf and 2 16v 470 uf). This replaced a Fostex mixer so it's a step up; but I want to replace all the caps before something else goes wrong.
Oh geez I had to do the same to one of those mixers. I also replaced some of the supposedly noisey opamps but that got only partially rid of the waterfall. So the noise problem seems to be related to the potentiometers and resistors.
I have a real Mackie 1202 that also died due to capacitor problems, though I encountered something new - several of the electrolytics had failed short. I'm used to them failing open... very odd.
Thanks for your video and tips. Great Post. I fix lots of audio gear and we got a lot behringer equipment. Nice lab by the way
Now to be fair, this mixer is 10+ years old and these things are among the cheapest you can get for a given feature set. You get what you pay for, in this case cheap caps sourced locally in China - which I suspect may have been problematic from day one.
Has noise improved now? Having played with a newer Xenyx Q1002USB, I didn't find it to be particularly problematic, although the mic input definitely missed its EIN spec (supposedly -134 dBu shorted, my estimate was -126 dBu shorted = -124.8 dB @ 150 ohm, quite consistently for both inputs - presumably the input transistors don't have rbb' nearly as low as they should, perhaps due to switching suppliers; it's certainly not typical for the whole company, as Julian Krause found plenty good 150 ohm EIN even on their cheapest USB audio interface, the UM2). Yes, my current Mackie 402 VLZ4 will get about 4.5 dB lower mix bus noise, its preamp distortion remains negligible even near max gain, and I think peak internal level handling is more like +22 dBu instead of +16 dBu. Still, you should be able to get plenty decent dynamic range through the Behringer if you get the gain staging right.
For a nominal 2 Vrms / +8 dBu peak output (roughly 1 V/div), I would recommend the following settings:
Channel level ~ 0 dB (adjust input gain accordingly)
Main mix ~ -10 dB
Reduce main mix if you need less.
BTW, I don't know how you're getting the signal out of the PC in the first place, but if it's an unbalanced output I hope you soldered the XLR cables yourself. Otherwise you will not be getting the benefits of the balanced input at all.
If both the signal source and the mixer output side are *grounded:*
unbalanced signal --> red wire --> XLR pin 2
unbalanced ground --> blue wire --> XLR pin 3
Cable shield should connect *either* to unbalanced ground *or* XLR pin 1, I just keep forgetting which one was the better of the two.
If either side is *floating:*
unbalanced signal --> red wire --> XLR pin 2
unbalanced ground --> blue wire --> XLR pin 3
unbalanced ground (2) --> shield --> XLR pin 1
This cable _may_ work just as well in a "both sides grounded" scenario but it somewhat depends on XLR pin 1 routing within the device, so YMMV. (A mixer introduced in 2002 may very well not be AES48-2005 compliant. A schematic for the smaller UB802 is out there, and that shows pin 1 going straight to AGND with no dedicated chassis ground in sight, so seemingly not compliant.)
Thanks for this vid! You make it look so easy though - where do you find replacement caps exactly the same size as the originals?
The list of replacement caps with the exact Digikey parts numbers is linked in the video description.
They designed that device to break 3 days off warranty and then you were supposed to buy another one, fixing it amounts to theft, you might as well have grabbed one at the store and ran away with it! ; )
You said, "warning" but didn't explicitly say what you were warning about. Fortunately I figured it out and took my earphones out just in time.
What sound card did you use for the scope demo? It looks nice and clear on the vectorscope :)
Just like bananas that look good from the outside, but are bruised beyond edibility on the inside. Some deceptions just never change.
I have the american made Mackie 1202 (what Behringer basically ripped off), made in the 80s, and that thing actually does need to be recapped. I just haven't felt like taking it apart and doing it.
Dang. That one too? There is no safe place in modern electronics!