I'm waiting for the doors for my studio to come in, so I thought I'd work on some projects that I've been meaning to do for a while since I had some down-time.  About a year ago, I bought four channel strips from a Yamaha PM-1000 console with the intention of racking them up into two 2-unit boxes.  So about two weeks ago, I started pulling the stock channels apart and stripping all the extraneous wiring and controls, leaving the mic preamp section and EQ.  I replaced all the electrolytic capacitors with Nichicon audio-grade caps, and replaced the film capacitors in the EQ section with Wima's.  I also adjusted the EQ frequency points from their stock values to somethign a little more usable and closer to the frequencies used on the Neve EQ's.  All the transistors were replaced with newer low-noise versions.  I also swapped the stock slide switches for rotary switches because it's easier to drill a round hole than cut a rectangular one in a front panel.  I had the front panels laser engraved like most of my other gear.  I finished up the first unit on Friday night and it's currently being used by my friend Josh Fuson.  I knocked out the second channel yesterday.  Here's a shot:

 
The other project I started at around the same time is to refurbish the Allen & Heath SD12-2 mixer I bought last year.  It's a pretty simple circuit, but it's really damn noisy, so I'm replacing all the electrolytic capacitors and opamps.  I think I'm also going to add an EQ bypass switch to each channel to hopefully cut down on some of that noise.  Based on the date codes on the back of the pots, it looks like this board was probably built in late '79.  At this point I'm not sure that I'm going to keep it.  I don't think it will fit into my current setup.  I kind of bought it on a whim with the intention to use the pres as a front-end for my DAW as it has direct outs on every channel, but the last thing I need at this point is more preamps.  So it will probably be up for sale in the next month or so.  I'll post some photos when I get it all finished, but here's a shot of the stock guts:

I've been concentrating primarily on finishing my basement studio over the past few months, and I've vowed not to start any new electronics projects until the basement is finished.  However, I reached a milestone on the basement the other night (finished putting up all the drywall), so I thought I'd switch it up for a night and knock out some small things I'd been planning on doing for a while.  Tonight, I added XLR connectors to my dbx 165A compressor and Orban 622B EQ.  They both originally had barrier strips for the inputs and outputs, and adding XLR connectors is an easy job that needed to be done.  While I was in there, I added a Jensen output transformer to the dbx since it had an unbalanced output and I had an extra transformer on hand.  I had done some extensive modifications to both of these units a few months ago.  On the dbx, I swapped all the electrolytic capacitors for Wima film caps, and swapped out all the opamps in the signal path for NE5532/5534s where applicable.  On the Orban, I followed some suggestions made by Scott Dorsey, which conisisted mostly of opamp upgrades and capacitor swaps.  It was a lot of work, and my Hakko 808 desoldering gun got a good workout, but it was well worth the effort based on my initial listening tests.  I can't wait to get them in my (finished) studio and finally run them through the paces.

I think I'm going to do some mods to my Oktava MK-012s tomorrow while I still have all my soldering gear pulled out.

Well, after lots of trial and error, I've got a gallery up and running.  The old gallery I had was bloated and cumbersome.  This one is much more streamlined as it's based on some pretty simple javascript. 

I'll be adding other content soon.

 -Nate

I was getting tired of the old layout, so I stripped it back even more.  It's still a work-in-progress, but I already like it better.  I'll be implementing a new photo gallery sometime soon as well.