NCD/DQV: Win some and lose some

[Iron1]

Got my hands on a “brand new” DBX 266XL compressor today on the cheap. The guy bought it, took it to his cousins jam space and it got lost in the shuffle of his cousin dying. Literally never turned on until I got it home a few hours and hooked it up. Clean as a whistle and works like a charm.

I tried to run it in line with the Alessis Quadraverb 2 I inherited when Moose died last year but couldn’t get a signal through. The Q2 fires up, let’s you scroll through the presets, edit, etc but doesn’t output sound.

I pulled the Q2 outta the chain and everything worked. Swapped out the cables I was using to run the DBX to the Q2 and still nothing. Upon further inspection, it looks like the Q2 isn’t inputting the signal as the LED on the DBX responds as designed, but there’s no correlating LED response on the Q2.

Gonna try to mess with it this week - see if I can clean out the pots and jacks, maybe locate and fix a loose connection, but I don’t have high hopes.

Planned to use it for vocal FX (reverb, chorus, delay, etc.) so that leaves me wondering what’s the modern equivalent to one of these?

And, anyone have any troubleshooting ideas?

[Iron1]

Ok, got the signal thru the system - the input and output pots on the Q2 are crazy filthy inside, which is what seemed to stop the signal - tuen 'em both just right and >boom< signal flows like wine. So, I ordered some DeOxit to get those cleaned out. Also noted the battery inside it for the user presets is dead (what? That little watch battery can't last 27 years? Preposterous!) so I'll have to get one of those too, but from what I've read it's soldered to the PCB... who does that?



Oh well, in the meantime I can still fiddle fool with it.

[Chris]

Contact cleaner is magic. More than once over the years it's been able to "fix" something I thought was toast.