Hey guys,
First post here. I've been having some issues with our Studer 827 and in my various searches I noticed there was a lot of good information coming out of here... hopefully I can get in on some of it!
I was having issues with pops and clicks on our repro head and ended up sending the heads away to ATR Services who were able to remedy the problem which they attributed to a combination of core grounding issues and a bad batch of tape. They were very helpful and got all of the tape replaced.
So I got the heads back yesterday and put them back on the machine. Upon playing back our MRL, the first 16 channels were looking pretty normal on both the sync and repro head but I noticed there were some problems on the last 8 meters. Channels 17,19,21, and 23 were spiked at +12 and were responding to the MRL recording (the meters were bouncing when the legendary MRL man had something to say). However, channels 18,20,22, and 24 weren't passing any signal. I tried adjusting the REC and SYNC levels in the alignment, but none of the channels responded.
I've taken the following steps:
Reseated the heads
Reseated all cards
Swapped the preamp card for 9-16 with 17-24
Swapped the dsub for 9-16 with 17-24 on the head block
Played back my tone printed work tape to confirm it wasn't just the MRL
I've also played back a brand new blank tape (ATR Magnetics). All meters showed no signal.
I had one one other weird thing happen while troubleshooting this problem. The machine randomly powered down, stayed off for a few seconds and then powered back up.
Anything jumping out at anyone?
Thanks so much in advance!