Indeed.
Pretty sure I have that album.
That wonderful first album by frequency and the sweeps.
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Yep saw them when they were supporting
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As TLC put it, Don’t go chasing waterfalls
When I was doing learning back in the day our lecturer on music recording things told us pink noise was the way to go.
I can feel some weekend borrowing of things from work coming on.
This kind of porn takes real imagination.
‘Nother one just delivered. Two this week from same customer. Kind of think they should change what they are doing. Keeps me in brews and biscuits though I suppose.
Arrived today in the post.
Need to have a good think about what to do with them as having no spares will make the build interesting.
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Pls to send to me 
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Probably the safest bet but where’s the fun in that 
For me, lots
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Since I got the AudioValve Eclipse pre, it’s been prone to valve noise. So much so that I’ve condemned blameless valves, which went on to test fine…
When I had a closer look, I found the valve-holder contacts were often a loose fit, so crimped them up, but also the soldering of the bases was poor - with poor wetting/contact, or blobby solder, or nearly no solder, and always very dirty.
Bad soldering was everywhere once I got the magnifying glasses on - e.g.
Poor old Herr Becker built this one in 2021, and was dead from cancer by early 2022, so I’d guess it’s not one of his finest efforts, sadly…
It’s not a hugely complex pre by modern standards, but is certainly not minimalist - with its remote-controlled source and volume switching, a strange relay-switching self-cleaning regime, balance control, complicated dual mono PSU and more front-panel LEDs than a xmas tree.
There’s lots of inconsistencies - like I found the thumbscrews on the right that hold the lid on were tapped-out for M6, the left for M5 - and each actual thumbscrew was actually a cap with a set-screw inside it for some barmy reason.
More annoying - every single plugged connection inside the thing had been hot-melt glued in place! Why? They’re all locking plug types!
The list goes on. Point being, nothing with valves in is going to run indefinitely with SO many bad solder joints.
So last night I started labelling and dismantling the thing, and after around 6 hours work (yes, really, that hot melt is tough stuff), it now looks like this:
I’ve used a couple of fistfuls of 90mm nylon bolts so I can turn it upside down without fucking it up and to try and avoid flexing the board too much, but really could do with a much bigger PCB holder than the weedy thing I have!
Since I’m going to this much trouble, I’ve ordered some foo from Mouser and Hifi Collective - some middling Jantzen caps to replace the no-name polyester blobs, a mix of 3-5W metal film R and some 1W Tants, a couple of decent voltage regs to replace the 7805s, some discrete soft-recovery diodes to replace the bridges, and some 500V / 105C rated smoothing caps, as what’s in there is a bit marginal; got some better quality Teflon valve bases too, to replace the rattly chinesium ceramic ones.
I plan to replace the rigid standoffs with some rubber bushings to support the PCB when it goes back together, and try to make sense of the grounding - e.g. the toroidal’s steel bolt is grounded to the audio circuit’s ground plane; sure, there’s no risk of a ‘shorted turn’ connection happening when you’ve got a perspex lid! But it still seems odd. Correspondingly the balance control (and only that) is grounded directly to Earth, and not to system ground… Daresay I’ll discover why these are like this if I try changing them… This thing is - somewhat amazingly - completely quiet even at driver-killing volumes, so I’m probably missing something…
Few other bits and bobs to do, but they’re mostly just a sacrifice to the Gods of Wooo and Audiophilia nervosa…
The main job was to reflash all of the solder joints - almost all of them were awful, and almost all of them spit flux out like volcanoes, so evidently Herr Becker worked fast and dirty… The cleanup alone will take hours! 
This may take a while…
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If this doesn’t end up with a pile of bits left over shame will be apportioned on the house of meat.
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Absolutely.
The likeliest outcome is a dead pre quietly snuck into The Cupboard of Shame, and then the search for a new toy…
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Squoze some cheap Russian Teflon caps in the Pearl 2 instead of the tiny Wimas.
Bigger has got to be better right?
Well this is turning into A Job.
Discoveries made:
-
Random thru-hole sizing, which means 2W AN tants won’t fit unless I a) spend hours filing the leads down, b) drill the holes larger - which risks all manner of fuckery, or c) weld
on some slimmer leads… -
Tracks which had been misprinted and then cut-out with a disc cutter to make the circuit work.
-
Lands which connect to nothing, requiring component leads to be connfuckted to other leads instead…
Hey-ho… More very expensive bits that probably won’t fit now on order…
Betimes, the whole rear panel has been stripped down and (mostly) dismantled, cleaned, a couple of minor tweaks inserted, and then reassembled.
The design is a mite disturbing, as the RCA PCB sits VERY close to the (potentially conductive) back panel, requiring some very careful lead-trimming and filing flat; I bunged some hairy Tema tape back there as well, for belt’n’braces reasons, though - so far - the steel back panel has never actually been Earthed…
In progress:
Done:
Front panel is a bit less of a clusterfuck - seemingly random grounding aside - so just some re-touching and cleaning to do.
Also checked to see if the rubber anti-vibration bushings I have will fit, which with the addition of the Acousti Products silicone washers (that I never did find a use for) added, they do…
It’s a standoff -
There’s overkill, and then there’s madness.
Wibble 
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A labour of love !
Nice reconstruction of the hard-pressed French trying to contain the charge of the Scots Greys at Waterloo over on the right-hand side, by the way
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Your erudition knows no bounds!