From: "Alexander W. Chin" Subject: WARNING: D3 posting coming up! Date: Sat, 28 Jun 1997 03:06:15 +1000 Hi everybody, Your long winded-not-so-beloved Alex is back. The only reason I am writing is because I still have one exam to do on Monday, and I need the distraction. Really, I always find something to distract myself with during exam period. Always. Anyways, this can be interesting to some people. As you all know, I have a D7 and a D8. And almost all of the technical postings about these machines come from me. This is because they are always in a state of disassembly. Lately, I bought a second hand D3. The one (I believe) before the D7. This was my dream machine as a kid, always dreamed of touching one of these. I was a little disappointed that this one was black (I saw pictures of a D3 that had the same finish as the D7). Anyways..... The seller posted it for sale, and set a cheap price (I am a student, so I went for it). Reason for it being so cheap was because it did not work properly. Been to SONY for repair once, costing $200 or so. Worked for a while. Then does not again. Something like that. Well, I got this package in the mail, slightly dented. Probably USPS or Australia Post's fault. Bastards! Since we have 240 V here, I dug up my 240 V-110 V transformer. Plugged the power supply in, and fired it up. Came up fine, and put the battery in for charging. The power supply lasted for all of 3 minutes. Then it started squealing, squawking, buzzing, and singing. Finally it died. Fine. Piss me off. Perfect. So, I opened it up. After a little nosing around with my trusty old multimeter, I found out nothing was majorly damaged except for the switching transistor. So I dug up my junk box and found one. Put it in and it worked again. Only problem is, the original transistor was this small (have fingers held 2 mm apart), and the spare replacement from my junk box is this big (have hands held 3 feet apart). So I have a power supply with uhm.... an open box and 3 wires leading to a huge transistor, exposed live, sitting on my carpet, spewing out electromagnetic radiation around the flat. Yes, excellent. Now all I need to do is touch the metallic transistor. Oh, I forget to mention. When the power supply died, it also took with it my 240 V to 110 V transformer. Damn. So, I crawled over to my flatemate's room and stole his... silently of course, with intention to return eventually. Anyways, now over to the D3. Did not work right. The seller was right. The 'CAUTION' light comes on quite often. Can't even get it to open the bloody door. Well, you could after about 15 tries, and 2 cups of coffee. Loaded a tape. Worked for a bit and 'CAUTION' again. Then tried to remove the tape. 'OPEN' followed by some thinking (this D3 likes to think a lot).. and more CAUTION. Am I missing something here? Surely this can't be such a cautious machine... So my trusty old rusted screwdriver comes out. If there isn't a nominee for worst design, this one takes it. SONY has done it again. This macine is designed for the patient in mind. You cannot open it easily. Really... I wonder now how they got it in the box in the first place. Nightmare. On the D7, you can open it up, remove 4 screws and some clips. After that, you can separate the bottom circuit board from the mechanics. And, while the board is separated, it still works. So you can hook up your CRO or whatever test gear and measure while it runs. On the D3... life is just so unkind.... cannot be done. In fact taking the board away from the mechanics is a challenge. If you haven't tried it, do it when extremely bored. Really. Anyways, I managed to extract the board. When I looked at it, I went ba-jesus... When it was sent to SONY for repair, they really repaired it good. Trails of solder and solder flux all over the place and evidence of... jesus... I shall not describe the gory details here. People with weak hearts could die and then I would be in trouble. Long and short.. SONY didn't know what was wrong with it and changed parts at random. Well they got warm I should say. Some parts they changed actually did come close to the fault. Quite close, but not there. And I thought they were qualified. I managed to extract the tape from it. To test it and see it in action as another matter. One has to (almost) totally reassemble the D3 before it will function again. So after a bit of buggering around, I narrowed the problem down. During the 'UNLOAD' phase, something somewhere was causing it to die. The mechanics are exactly identical to the D7/D8. Exactly. Same motors, gears, springs... well almost. One thing this D3 has that is better than the D7, is the head assembly. It is made from a metal base (probably alloy of some sort), compared to the dicky plastic one on the D7. The upper drum is a full covered one, with just two slots for the head chips to poke out. The D7 one is a half-covered one with a 2 mm gap between upper and lower drum. Makes it very easy for a tape to get stuck in bewteen and snap your heads. Happened to me, will happen to you. Especially when you have this must have show to tape. Trust me, it will happen to you. But, I bet that is a SONY marketing ploy. Your heads snap, we replace them. We charge you. Excellent plan. Generally the D3 head is of a better quality build. Back to the problem at hand. The unload phase causes a 'caution'. First thing that came to mind was the unload detector. So, I disassembled the sucker again, and took it apart to clean. Cleaned it well. Not well enough though. Reassembled it. Did not work. Grr.. Then cleaned the rotary encoder. Reassembled it... worked a little better. Later I discovered that I could reproduce this problem reliably by applying some pressure to the rotary gear. Could always reproduce the problem, and make it go away by putting pressure in a certain direction. So, I re-timed the gearing system. It worked fine after that. Reassembled and closed it up. End of story. Not! After 30 minutes use, the thing played up again. Talk about super-reliable. So I bit the bullet. I went down an bought some LEDs (5 to be exact). Then I soldered them to key points on the board. Namely to the surface mount IC pins. The IC clips we get in Australia are so huge, you can't clip them on to the SONY ICs, which are really small by the way. With 5 flashing LEDs now I could see every aspect of operation. Where the rotary gear was, which position, angle, and well.. pretty much everything the SONY chip sees. As my arse luck would have it, it worked perfectly once the monitoring LEDs were in place. Must be another SONY marketing ploy. Works while in the workshop, but not in the field. And they charge you for investigating the problem on the bench. Excellent plan. Of course, life is fair to kind people like me. The problem can always be coaxed to show up. And I made it reappear. So, apparantly, the LEDs told me that what I suspected in the very first place was right. The Unload detector was bad. So I took it apart again and really cleaned the contacts good now. Oh, by the way.. this time, I put it into 'TEST' mode. You solder a jumper on the board to do this. I did notice that funnily, this jumper had never been soldered before. You would think SONY would actually make use of this test mode diagnostics before replacing components at random. And yes, it told me what my LEDs did. Same story. I then cleaned up the mess that SONY repairman did and put it back, retimed the mechanism properly, and it then works like a charm. Never a problem. I monitored my LEDs in every possible mode I could put it into. Worked like a charm for 3 hours. Oh, the head guides were not aligned right, so I did a quick re-align, without a CRO either. Did it by eye and ear. Excellent. Having done that to my D7 and D8, why not the D3. So I put it back, almost. Before putting the final cover on, I popped in a tape and listened to music. So at finally reassembly, the 'CAUTION' light came on again. Bloody hell, no wonder the owner sold it. Drove him up the wall. I was crawling up my wall by this time too. But... but... the CAUTION light came on while the tape was playing, not during the unload phase. So, this has got to be a new problem. Took the cover apart. It works like a charm. Put it on, it is cautious. Take cover off.. it works. Very cautious with cover on. After several iterations, it had to be the cover. No wait. It only happens when the cover was screwed on. Having the cover on, but not screwed in is cool. Yes, I got it... faulty screws.. yes that has to be it. SONY makes faulty screws. Good one. Not so lucky... So, the cover had to be applying pressure somewhere to cause this. So, if pressure causes this, then we can make it happen too right? So I applied pressure. By sitting on it, banging it, farting on it... everything. No dice. But the screwed on cover does it nicely. Excellent. Well, it is obviously not pressure. Then I thought it was the screw. So I screwed it into the screw-hole. No dice either. The screw was good. But if the cover was on and screwed it don't work... Ok, the solution... put the cover on with sticky tape. Perfect. No, this was getting me very curious. More experimentation showed that a screwed on cover which is not totally closed works too. On a hunch, I measured the cover. Guess what? It is made of metal. So, it is a conductor. So, it must be touching something. Quick glance shows only a few flexible cables in the way. My magnifying glass tells me that the cables are good. No break in the insulation. A look at the cover. Which part of this cover could touch the cable? Hmm... here could... maybe it is rough. Lets have a feel of the surface. Bloody f***ing hell! Now it decides to bite me. It did!! it cut my finger in two. See? (showing the bandaged finger now)... So, this is another of SONY's excellent marketing plans. If the consumer opens it, cut him. But it was obviously cutting into the cables (which showed no sign of damage). A piece of paper between the razor edge and the cables fixed that problem. So, that was the end of the saga. Life is now good. In actual use, it sounds nice. In Seth's market posting, the D3 sounds nicer than the D7. Believe it. It is true. Sounds so nice and smooth it gives me a hard-on. Well not really... but you get the idea. Very nice sound. And I thought my D7 was good. My remote control which I programmed with Heiko's SIRCS program works, almost. Most keys work, except Clock.. but the D3 doesn't seem to have a clock, which could explain it. The light doesn't work either. On my remote I can turn the backlight on/off from the remote, but it doesn't work on the D3. Also, FF/CUE doesn't work here. The servos are about the same as the D7. The searching algorithm is better than the D7 though, more accurate, and faster. So, in conclusion... i) Don't open a D3.. life is better than this. ii) Don't pay SONY to open it, they don't know what they are doing iii) Don't pay SONY to design stuff, the can't do it well iv) D3 is better than D7, sonically v) D3 has better mecha algorithms than D7 vi) D3 looks way cool vii) I am long winded, and have a warped sense of humor viii) If you all enjoyed this... consider getting me a) a service manual for the D3 b) a transistor for the power supply Hope I didn't offend anybody. Oh yes, I will still not be studying. I am now off to download some pictures. Cheers Alex ============================================================================== Alexander W. Chin Unisearch Multimedia Suite 232 Systems Administrator National Innovation Centre E-mail : alexc@newt.phys.unsw.edu.au Australian Technology Park Phone : (612) 9209 4065 Garden Street, Eveleigh Fax : (612) 9209 4061 NSW 1430 http://gerulf.acsu.unsw.edu.au/~alex Australia