Well I always bang on about these two things…1 – never get someone out of Yellow Pages because they sound cheap and local, and 2 – you get what you pay for, although if you go with option 1 you will definitely pay more than you expect.
I’ve seen the vans in the area, I won’t mention names but the vans advertise aerial installations for £39 + VAT, this raises one important question for me – what ...
Continue Reading →A PS42A457 Plasma TV. Stuck in standby would be a better description and once again, the customer wasn’t really sure if it would be worth repairing. The standby light was on but there was none of the normal clicking from the power supply relays and no response to the remote or front controls.
Due to the lack of relay activity this was probably, but not certainly, a power supply problem. What the relays do is feed the ...
Continue Reading →
Well you see all sorts in this trade but this was a first for me. I’m in touch with fellow engineers from around the world and this poor Gecko was found in the back of a TV in Albania. The TV was wall mounted and should have had a cover fitted where the stand slots ...
I was called to this recorder because it was locking up, it would stick on one channel at switch on and not allow any channel change or menu operations until it had been switched off and back on at the mains, even then it would only operate for a few seconds until it locked up again. This ...
Is it possible to have too much signal from your aerial? What would the result be if this was the case?
The answer to the first question is yes, and to the second question…the result would be the same as having too little signal, a pixelated picture or even no signal.
Twice in the last week I’ve been called to homes where this was happening, both homes had aerials that had been fitted by me four ...
Continue Reading →A quick video showing the internal workings of the turntable section, more about the small motor and pulley at the bottom left drive the tonearm guide wire. Complete with a little AC/DC to keep you interested….
[embedyt]http://youtu.be/C2GhSWHoq9U[/embedyt] Continue Reading →Ok, so I’m not sure Hi Fi is quite the word for a Sharp VZ-3510, it’s an all in one unit with an upright turntable, very cutting edge back in the eighties, but perhaps a bit gimmicky!
This one had been purchased from eBay and the radio worked, the cassette deck worked and the turntable door would open and close but it would not play the record. This took me back to a day where I had ...
Continue Reading →Here I will try and describe my own music system. Several years ago I decided I wanted rid of my sizeable CD collection as it was taking over one of our rooms. The solution I found was to rip every CD to a network attached storage device ( or NAS ). The one I chose was supplied by DBM Servers, viagra 60mg it was 3Tb and contained Vortexbox software and a CD drive. ...
Continue Reading →When most people think about quality Hi Fi they think more about component parts of the system, the Amp, CD player and Speakers. There are indeed many very high end manufacturers with components costing thousands of pounds and these will reproduce music in the most amazing way. But…if you play a poor source into one of these systems the results could be very disappointing!
For me quality sound begins with the source ie. Vinyl, CD, MP3 etc. ...
Continue Reading →Yes, I know Google can be very helpful for all sorts of things, I use it all the time for finding useless information, and believe me, when it comes to TV repairs most of the advice on there is just that…useless, written by people with no formal training or skills, or even regard for their own…and others, safety!
Most trades are regulated in some way, you can’t, or shouldn’t, even install a 13 amp socket or an ...
Continue Reading →Well I say ‘old’ but these days anything over five years old seems to be considered ‘past it’. Well this seven or eight year old TV was brought into me completely dead, no standby light, nothing. This was expected to be terminal by its owner but was infact just a very small capacitor in the power supply. No, it wasn’t bulging as most of the youview and Google ‘experts’ would have you believe, actually in the last few ...
Continue Reading →Well the first three days of this week were spent in Paris, leaving me just a couple of days to catch up on all the work. There were multiple messages left on the answerphone, as we expected, so Yvonne got cracking on those straight away. I find it unbelievable that people knew from the message that we would be back at work on Thursday but couldn’t actually wait that long, aerial work had gone elsewhere and a possible ...
Continue Reading →Anyone that’s read my earlier posts may be aware of the problems with Panasonic DVD Recorders recording a favourites list rather than the selected timer program. This only happens with BBC channels and the theory is that it was an update the BBC had done to their red button / digital text service. Up to now nothing seemed to provide a cure for this but Panasonic have just made us aware that an over the air software update ...
Continue Reading →I seem to be getting a lot of Hi Fi in for repair at the moment, I have a customer near Stogumber with a very nice Teac system and some time ago I was called to service the amplifier, this time it was the CD player that needed attention. Sometimes it would play and sometimes not, I thought it may be simply a case of cleaning the lens on the laser, this is very common, but in this ...
Continue Reading →I seem to have been looking at some really old gear recently, just shows how well built it was back then…the eighties in this case. But first, I had a mixed bag of jobs this morning…an aerial extension into two bedrooms, thankfully working indoors as outside it was blowing a gale and hailing. Then it was a simple job of connecting up a YouView box, then disabling a child lock at my next call, and then an even ...
Continue Reading →I had this morning free and really needed to get into the workshop to complete a few repairs, there was also a 37″ Samsung that had been dropped off at our house to look at, and a customer just around the corner with a 26″ Sony that was freezing on channel change, then rebooting itself. I had a nasty feeling this was another software problem associated with the BBC red button, the clue…it only happens on BBC channels! ...
Continue Reading →Well today was always going to be about the 50″ Samsung Plasma I’ve been working on for the last couple of weeks. Sound but no picture, doesn’t sound too bad does it, but on these it can get very complicated indeed. At the customers house I noticed that the top buffer IC had destroyed itself, this means the one below it is probably gone as well, also a whole host of parts on the Y-Sus panel. It’s a ...
Continue Reading →Today started with a couple of aerial jobs, one inside and one outside in the terrible wind. The one in the loft was easy enough, just replace a two way masthead with a four way and run a lead into a bedroom, I was even able to use some existing trunking to hide the cable down the wall…an easy job.
Next it was out with the ladders and up on to a roof in Washford where the ...
Continue Reading →Today started with something I haven’t done in a long time…putting a hairdryer into a video recorder! Why, you might ask…well I was called to install this machine not knowing that it had just been brought in from a cold car. Videos suffer badly from condensation and being brought into a warm room had caused a lot of it to form on the rotating heads. In this condition putting a cassette in results in the tape sticking to…and ...
Continue Reading →