Speaking for Dave without permission here, but there's no benefit of which I can conceive from pulling TR... -Unless you want to sell it of course. -In fact have a TR buyer waiting, and I'll happily put anyone who wants to swap the necessary TR parts for money in direct contact; -I have no financial interest or vestment. -If you DO remove the TR cards as detailed in Dave's post, you'll also have to re-solder the 611 (channel strip) motherboard jumpers from "mpx" to "non-mpx" -I think it's two jumpers per 611. -Not a big job at all.
TR was noisy
when running (you're probably familiar with the
"Frrrrrrr-ikka-tikka" noise which pervades the background of TR playbacks!) but didn't add any noise when not activated.
To be honest, you'll likely get a greater noise improvement from removing the in-console CRT screen and replacing it with an LCD panel. I've had some luck in the past picking up screens from
http://www.ebay.co.uk (note: British eBay), since the screen connector to the console carries composite video, 12VDC and ground. Any PAL LCD composite monitor which will work in a car should therefore work in an E or G series.
In fact you CAN use an NTSC monitor and get a picture, but the bottom 100 scan lines will be missing, so the last couple of items on mix lists, cue lists, TR lists etc will not be visible... -Workable in a PINCH... but not a doable solution. -IN fact, one time we actually rigged one of those "clamshell" portable DVD players which has an external video input connector, and an external 12VDC connector... and rigged it right on the meterbridge as a swift work-around.
Anyhow, getting rid of the CRT screen has brought benefits, and people have also commented that they've found the LCD image clearer/more stable/more pleasant to look at...
The Jumpers of which Dave speaks are in fact just 8-way ribbons looping the eight "fader send" pins to the
"fader return" pins, but there should be NO audible benefit in replacing the computer with ribbons, since the signal at that point is DC, and I can't hear DC very well!
There's no 'scanning' of the faders taking place in the console, so no noise to be removed. Only when TR is active do the eight little buffers in the center section broadcast their evil little messages down the lateral antennae... -sorry,
"TR buses"... which makes the background "fritttta-tikkka" during TR resetting.
Hope this helps more than it obfuscates... (-with my explanations, -you never really know!)
Keith