Hi!

The other day I came into the floor ground of the building of my studio, in the hallway I felt the smell of burnt electronics. I was even approached by a worried neighbor. When I opened the door to my studio it was clear it came from me and I ran into the machine room, and found pretty soon that one cage of 16 channels was down. After shutting down and checking everything I found that on the Carrier Processor Card (the wider one with a small display) one electrolytic cap C81, just by the d-type connector, had burnt and exploded and popped out of the PCB and partly melted both the corner of the PCB and the d-sub connector.

I contacted Harrison and we came to the conclusion that the problem was that capacitor and not the PSU powering it. I also was told that Harrison is out of these cards.... Ouch!!!

Luckily for me I got a spare one when I bought my console and I'm also looking at probably scale down my system from 72 to 56 channels so hopefully I'll be fine for a couple more years. BUT...please guys!...Take some time soon and pull out the cards and check the components, especially the electrolytics, to see if they start to fail. I believe a clear sign of this is that the top of the cap is not flat anymore but is beginning to bulge. You could look also for other alarming signs, like darkened areas from components that have gone hot... I don't know...just anything/everything that looks unusual..

Please don't do this only for saving your system, but also to prevent a fire... I'm concerned that there isn't an internal fuse shutting things down before things start to melt and explode.. Things was burning hot in my otherwise very cold machine room, and things could have been much worse...

Take care everybody!