soundcraft 6000 mods and upgrades

[steve honest]

HI Chaps
i have bought a soundcraft 6000 24/16, with a patchbay, its a nice desk, as i run it these last few days im growing to like its colour.
I have bought this desk to sum protools, i dot intend to track with it, as i have some very nice outbooard pres/eqs for that.
the desk has been neglected, and it crackles and pops and frys a bit , but today it was a bit better , the levels and meters are all out of wack, now i was going to get a tech to work on it in stages, but i think i would like to go thru this desk myself and clean it up and recap where needed,
i have read there are some nifty mods and parts replacements one can do to improve this desk, is there a place i can go and read about these mods? or can somebody help me with an article or email details on what to do?
best
steve

[GJC Designs]

Crackles, pops & meters well out of alignment could be down to dirty/seldom used switches and pots. I often find that simply exercising switches and pots will help a lot in reducing or getting rid of intermittent problems. The switches used in the 6000 have silver plated contacts and these tend to oxidise - exercising the switches breaks through the oxidation. Pots that are left in one position for extended periods of time can also go intermittent as well as feeling tight to turn.

Try the above as a first stage. It will cost you a bit of time, but may well save a lot of money.

[steve honest]

Hello and thanks Gareth
The desk has improved a lot in this week , as i use it daily while we tune the new control room, but i think monday i should start lifting modules out and get busy cleaning and servisoling,
Im still keen to find out about Upgrades that are known to work on this desk, i remember these sound-crafts and liked em,
but if i can change out opamps or caps or anythig to get it better i woudl love to do it as a project , starting with the master section and then going thru the groups , patch bay and channels
best
steve

[Jim Williams]

Opamp replacements will require extra circuit work. There needs to be local psu bypass caps added as well as phase lead caps added across the feedback nets. You can replace the EQ caps safely with quality polyprop film caps. The mic preamp needs some changes as well as the balanced line input stage if you want other than 072 opamps to work properly. The same applies to the master sum amps, those benefit from extremely low noise/THD opamps with extremely low noise discrete transistors.

[steve honest]

hi jim
thanks for the tips and advice now where would i find a details of what bits and where to put them? or is there somebody out there in the uk , that will do these upgrades for me?
best
steve

[steve honest]

hi guys
the headphone out put on my 6000 is very quiet, is there an easy mod to get more volume out of it? also it cuts out the control room speakers when i plug headphones in, which is a bum, as i like to go between headphones and speakers to check low end, is there a mod for this too? so i can not cut the monitors
cheers
steve

[GJC Designs]

Hi Steve,

1. Headphones cutting monitors.
Yes there is an easy mod to negate this. The headphones socket has 3 pairs of contacts: tip & tip normal, ring & ring normal, sleeve & sleeve normal. The sleeve terminals connect to ground - ignore them. Connect the 2 tip contacts togther. Connect the 2 ring contacts together. The jack socket will no longer break the signal when a headphones plug is inserted.

2. Headphones volume.
My business manufactures a range of useful pro-audio cards, one of which is a high-quality headphones amp.
It's an easy card to install, requiring a +/-17V to +/-30V power supply, unbalanced input, and headphones output to a separate socket. Board size is 97mm x 80mm

Let me know if this is of interest.

Cheers,

Gareth.