After Harrison Audio LLC received my 2 slaves and master Nubus cards they repaired the 2 slaves and posted them back via FEDEX priority with a suggestion to insure them for a replacement value of $10,000. This figure they state on the invoice as replacement value – not to be confused with actual value which is subject to a customs charge.
I received an email from FEDEX to say that the package was being held by UK customs who require £1700 + vat duty. They based this on the stated replacement value on the invoice.

Here is the important bit – DO NOT SEND THESE ITEMS OVER WITH A FRIEND TO SAVE MONEY!! You need to show a record of sending the item out of the UK otherwise they think you could be importing them and you will have to pay this huge fee. Keep a record of the postage trail. Video the items not working if you can, post on youtube to share the link to prove this is genuine.
After finding all the proof (luckily) I argued that they should only charge a % for the value of the service not the replacement value. I was ready to put up a fight when my original package suddenly appeared stating ‘Customs cleared.’ There was no charge. You can imagine my relief..Hope this helps someone.

After some investigation by a S12 tech newbie (me) I finally found something. Under the eq/aux panel I found four vertical cards attached to a bigger, also vertical, card. On one of the four smaller cards, on the failing channel, I found a red sensor light that was lit up all the time. The same lights on the other cards only lit up when moving faders. Swapped card with another channel and problem moved with the card.

Just ordered a new card, called Fader amp card, hopefully arriving next week. Will post again when installed. Cheers!/Paul

Edit: Those hand written crosses on the red connectors ‘could’ indicate earlier problem on this refurbished part, don’t you agree?! Glad to have it out of the way…

We have experienced very strange behaviours on our beloved S12 recently.

We sometimes had no input from channel 1 to channel 16 right from the powering up of the console. Some other times the sound was entering the channels, but not exiting them (no routing was working). Some other times it was the total opposite: sound was present even when the channels were muted!

Everything was pretty much unpreddictable, by the way…

As it was only on the first channel carrier (ch1 to 16), I checked the processor card of that carrier, and then every channel card.

I found that, on channel 16′s assignment board, one condenser was not good looking (it had leaked).

So I replaced the whole assignment board with a spare one, and that seems to have solved the problem.

BUT, as the problem was very unpredictable, I’m not yet sure that it is definitely solved. We’ll see in use if it stays OK!

EDIT Feb. 2018 : this wasn’t the solution to the problem, as it happened again after changing the assignment board. I eventually found the culprit several years later (!), while doing some cleaning :

After I had removed every channel cards and the brain card from the ch1-16 carrier, I noticed that the backplane (the big card on the bottom of the carrier, with the connectors which the channels plug into) was not tightly secured on the rack chassis, as a number of screws had gotten loose. So I tightened them all correctly and thought “wait a minute, some of those screws are used to bond the backplane’s ground to the chassis, so maybe this is the source of the problem ?”.

And bingo, after I had put every cards back in place, I started the console, and no problem with ch1 to 16. This was last year (2017), and the problem hasn’t happened a single time since !

What was happening was that depending on how bad the connection to the digital ground was, sometimes the serial data was not received correctly by the brain card (it needs this ground as a reference), and the corresponding channels would not start correctly. I also understand now why sometimes just pulling some cards out and then pushing them back in would temporarily solve the problem : it was just pushing the backplane on the chassis and re-bonding the digital ground for a while !

So here it is guys : if you’re control panel acts weirdly on startup, check those backplane screws !

Hope this helps…
Maikol

The touchscreen freezes, mostly while entering a slate for a channel. It becomes nonreactive to touch, and the mac says “Graphic slave has not responded, please save your work and restart”

A few seconds later it says “Autocard has not responded for 30 seconds”.
At the same time the racks are not displaying what they display normally, it’s as if they were disconnected.The only way to get it working again is to reload the code from the mac, or restart the mac itself.But the problem happens again quite immediately after reload if I try to enter a slate!!!

Pretty annoying! Has anyone ever experienced this?

EDIT : problem solved!
JUST TRASH THE “SLATE” FILE IN THE GLW FOLDER!!!

That “slate” file stores all the suggestion the touchscreen gives you when you are typing a channel’s slate on it, so this can get pretty big afters years of using the console. Until a point where it slows down so much the console that the computer thinks the touchscreen has crashed!