After over a year of riding around in a box the Ramsa WR8210 was put back together.

Evidently I've some slider caps to hunt out yet.

Living in a box didn't do the mixer a whole lot of good, as evidenced by the bent PCB for channel seven. The wear & tear is limited to aesthetics, and thankfully that's invisible once everything is buttoned up.

I either forgot to count up the caps in the headphone amplifier circuit, or they've been misplaced. Since this is a less than critical point I ignored it (along with a couple in the LED bar graph driver circuit) so I could reassemble the mixer and move on to the next thing.

At some point in the future I'll wrap up another year + old project!

Here's a quick size up of the connection blocks on the Ramsa 8210. I've decided to retain stock set-up to expedite getting on to the next project, but hopefully the photos here give a good idea of what can and cannot be done without getting deeper into metal work:

The holes punched for the RCA jacks are a good fit for 1/4 panel mount, though the gauge of metal may allow flex.

Spacing on the vertical is workable, side to side not so much. The send/receive would naturally allow a conventional TRS set up, but the SUB input would have to be engineered in else-how. Maybe retaining an RCA would allow for the most versatility?

Of course, that leaves needing to mount the XLR, which is mounted on the plastic block that would be ousted with a jack change. There's also the trifling detail that while the block has a center hole for mounting, the mixer metalwork does not, so something's going to either flap or be drilled.

All in all, not an out of sight project, the depth of the 1/4" plug should be allowed for with ease, given the depth of the stock plastic mount. I'm just opting to choose my battles here.

Continued work on the Ramsa 8210. All remaining circuitry is supported on a removable frame seen here.

I pretty much only made it as far as the rectifier PCB of the power supply and the routing strip feeding the summing sections. It is here that the green wire bandit, who modified this mixer sometime in the annals of history, stepped up their game and made the prospect of undoing their work broach nightmare territory.

But before I tread those waters, let's have a look at this cute little stand-off which separates the rectifier/regulation/filtering PCB from the rest of circuitry (seen below). I'm really fond of external power supplies. Fortunately the AC portion is directly piggy-back the metering strips, so I doubt there's a lot of concern here, but still.. a bit close for comfort.

Besides, I've clearly got greater things to be concerned with.

It is at this point that I am pretty much prompted to do what I can to retrace what has been done so I can attempt to wrap my head around what exactly was trying to be achieved here. I foresee some hours of fruitless internet searches regarding published modifications, before throwing up my hands and deciphering. While the iron was hot, I went ahead and reversed this mod. I will be checking continuity between the severed legs before application of power, naturally.

It was at this point that I began questioning the logic and motivation behind all of the green wire mods (most of which involved cutting traces), see, all those green wires are just reflecting the printed circuit traces that originally tied everything together. So, I see this work as a pointless waste of time... which sort of guides my outlook a little on the rest of things.

Perhaps those reworked connections were due to an intermittent failure in functionality? This is the second punched pad I've come across. And if someone spent hours cutting traces and weaving a convoluted single color loom of wiring trying to correct THIS, I may have may work cut out for me here.

What follows is my tactic for repetitive rework, such as is apt to be found in mixing consoles, multitracks and really bad production runs. As far as recaps go, this approach makes rather high part count projects only a little more difficult than a simple tube amp recap. In not necessarily the most accurate order:

1^st, I plot out the position of all parts to be replaced and mark the PCB so I can desolder everything on my bench (say, two or three channels) in a single pass. My preferred method of desoldering is to heat the joint with the iron and use a 7874B type pump to remove the bulk of material. Once most of the solder has been removed on everything at hand I will go through everything while the iron is still hot and twist each part looking for movement of both legs. If a leg is still soldered in, it will be heated while twisting to free it up before moving on to the next one. Once all parts are loose, I'll snip the bent ends if they don't pop out freely, and drop them out. This has resulted in minimization of pulled traces.

2^nd, each identical channel has the same parts count, this unit per channel count has been marked on the bags containing the parts.

3^rd, I begin with the lowest quantity per channel parts (typically "1") and load those all first, no higher part count parts are removed from the bags until it is their turn. Only the unique or super low part count parts are removed from the bags (and ALL of said quantity are removed prior to stuffing a single part). Pictured here is the 330uf, 100uf, 33uf and 4.7uf loaded into the "active" circuit, while an already stuffed part reference circuit (very important to this particular process, though after a few passes the example gets less and less attention) sits atop a bowl full of pull jobs. In the foreground are five 10uf that are to be stuffed as soon as the camera is set down, leaving all remaining seven slots for the 47 uf caps.

Observe polarity. This particular board is designed such that all "east-west" positioned caps had the ground lead to the left, and all "north-south" caps had the ground lead facing me, from the position that I was working on them. This made perpetual polarity checks less of an issue, but it's certainly not a feature one should count on.

Once the lot is stuffed it will be checked for shorts (a couple of the pads are very close to one another), cleaned, then reassembled.

160 some odd caps, minus a few known to have fled from the bench.

Channels are all done, next up is the summing, metering and PSU sections. Then a proper clean up & burn in.

Dug out the bench today, in hopes of getting a little work done.

The contents of this pan were strewn over the bench. You could say my junk box situation is a bit unruly at this point in time.

First tier of the actual progress pile is working through the Ramsa 8210 and freeing up even more space on the bench while also paving the way to record.

Each of the channel strips has been marked with its position in the frame, which I find odd, seeing as how the channel strips are presumably all identical, and actual channel number is a function of physical placement in the console. I doubt this mark is stock, and I take it to be a sign that someone has been inside this thing in the past.

Doing some fairly drastic work, from the look of things...

Cut traces and jumpers, I haven't really done a huge amount of research and/or reverse engineering on this yet. I'm toying with the idea of reverting two of the ten channels back to stock for comparative analyses, since eight direct outputs will mate with the recorder.

Then again, perhaps I'll just recap and reassemble for brevity sake. I will ponder what it would take to return a channel to stock before making a decision. I have decided to leave the (groan) RCA connectors alone at the rear. Since the Otari is technically unbalanced, I'm not losing anything with the form of the plug. My plan is to loom up RCA direct out/return and XLR pin 3 hot unbalanced snakes to a latching hard wired 1/4" patch bay, which will allow a no fuss interface to the rest of world and keep the weirdo connectors intact.

I only got one channel recapped, after preparing the bench. Though another channel has been torn down, and is ready for more caps (tomorrow).

Side by side comparison of the new and old. I'm loading it with Nichicon KW series, purportedly audio grade caps and inexpensive. Each channel carries 7x 47uf @ 6.3v (upgraded to 25v); 2x 10uf @ 25v (upgraded to 100v); 3x 10uf @ 63v (upgraded to 100v); 1x 330uf @ 6.3v; 1x 100uf @ 6.3v (upgraded to 25v); 1x 33uf @ 25v (upgraded to 35v) and 1x 4.7 @ 25v (upgraded to 50v).

Rest assured, I will be bolting these channels down out of the sequence printed on their frames, just because I can.

It's high time for some shoddy photography. (Apologies, it was clearly not my day for running a camera, though I certainly don't feel like reshooting this as imagery is secondary to the process)


Enter the Ramsa 8210. For years this thing sat on a shelf in a back room at the music store I worked at over a decade ago. Even then it lured me a bit, but for one reason or other never made me reach for my wallet (probably because I already HAD a mixer and was/am perpetually broke).

During the big move it went home with a friend to start a new life.


But it would seem that all was not well in mixer land, the several year lapse in use (I reckon easily a decade) had done damage to the switchery..


Reducing the preferred characteristic of plug and play (most beneficial when dealing with creativity) into a hammer party of exercising the moving parts with varying degrees of success.


Meanwhile, the electronic side of things had also decayed in the rut of disuse..


Which would explain the fact that when I picked this console up as potential trade fodder it wore a VOC odor of ruptured electronics in the same way some people wear perfume. I actually had to roll my windows down on the drive home to tolerate it resting in the passenger seat.


1 out of 3 is not bad. In all likelihood, the capacitors had dried up beyond use during the many years of neglect; application of power just made them fragrant.


In doing some initial investigation regarding this family of mixer I found some pockets of praise, so there's encouragement to fix it beyond my own simmering curiosity. In working on it I am seriously considering ousting the RCA phono type connector for the more instrument friendly 1/4" phone plug.


All rear connectors are contained on a separate circuit board card, making a jack retrofit rather trivial (once the channel strips are removed for recap). Hopefully they can be fitted without interference.