Hi it's mystery. teardown time answers on the back of a postcard please? What you think this might be? It's a bit of kit which I used many, many times are back in the day. For companies that I've worked for, what do you think it is? look at all these output B and C's hmm. what's a little trimmer caps? Nice.

Get in there if your tongue at the right angle and it's got some inputs with some LEDs at two, four, eight, and sixteen. Oh look, it's had some ground bounce. I'm here a week so what is it? Well, it's the Pc2 One Six Ax and it's a Sony Check this out. It's what's called an instrumentation data recorder and this is one of the more obscure bits of equipment that a Sony manufactured for a specific market.

In this case, this was like the industry standard instrumentation data recorder for use in the field that I was in, which was the seismic underwater industry, which is all our low-frequency type stuff. But like you know, hundreds of channels, multiple channels, and also the vibration test industry as well. You would actually hook all of your senses up to these B they are vibration sensors. Let's say you're testing a motor or an engine or something like that.

You might put you know dozens of different little vibration sensors all around it and you'd hook them up to all these input channels here and then you would record those under digital audio tape. And it was state-of-the-art for the day. It had 16-bit our converter on each individual wire Channel None of that multiplexing rubbish, but unfortunately the bandwidth did scale down based on how many channels you enabled. That's why we have the LEDs here.

For 16 channels, 8 channels, 4 channels and two channels in two channel mode, it had a bandwidth and analog bandwidth of 20 kilohertz and if you had all 16 channels enabled all sampling at once then it'd only have five kilohertz bandwidth. But hey, that's plenty for lots of vibration work and especially our seismic in underwater you know, sonar type stuff it was. It was. the Ducks Guts cost a fortune if anyone knows the original price.

I I Completely forget how much this thing cost, but if you had to ask the price, you probably couldn't afford it. and also there were there's a smaller model of this one an 8-channel I believe but you could also get like expansion units to hook on to. It was a complete like you know system thing. There are all sorts of digital interfaces and everything else.

Fantastic. Very niche bit of kit, but you know it became the industry standard in any sort of like analog recording. and I always wanted to tear one of these things down on at work but you couldn't because they you know like you. Just this was like the Holy Grail bit of recording here.

You just didn't go taking apart something like this willy-nilly and I think we even did. We get it calibrated I can't remember but you know you don't want to break the seals and everything else if you got caught being in deep trouble and this is actually manufactured by Sony Precision Technology. Inc This is a subsidiary of Sony that specifically make a nice high-end gear for you know, instrumentation and industry measurement and stuff like that. and the Sony Precision Technology Group actually started in 1969 so it's a very old group and they make some of the best nice stuff you've probably never heard of.

All the best stuffs made in Japan Stop before returning this equipment as you're all accessories. blah blah blah $50 replacement cost. Apparently this actually comes from a rental company and you could actually rent this gear because they were very expensive. So if your company that like needed to do some testing like a you know engineering company, you want to do some vibration or other types of you know testing for a couple of weeks at a test house you know usually wouldn't buy one of these, you just rent one.

So as you saw, it's got 16 analog inputs here. there's no way trimmers on those normal hundred K input impedance up to 20 supplies minus 26 volts peak there. With Sony Digital Audio Tape here we've got a large screen I'll pair it up and show you and you know you can set like multiple tape speed times 1 times 2 data rate stuff like that and you could put ID in there and tag And things like that could generate test signals and and you know it like it's really purposely designed. This is not a consumer bitter kid.

Purposely designed for this sort of you know, data measurement, vibration, and analog type are storage and replay because you've got the 16 outputs here. you've got individual trimmers on each one, you can trim the output level and stuff like that. There's a monitor you could microphone to do some annotation and stuff like that and on the back here because this was actually designed as a portable bit of kit and we used in the field very often. you know, like yeah, you maybe could have done this with like a big multi-channel DAC card in a PC like an ISA bus PC back in the day or something like that.

but having a PC do this sort of stuff, especially in a portable environment. We would actually take this out to a like a lake where we'd actually test underwater sonar. Gary yes and don't want to, you know, drag around a PC having a portable B The kit like this was much better. anyway.

it did have a battery or he could exert from an external battery pack here, but also this one actually has a battery eliminator here. This is just the mains input, so universal mains input. You could pair it from mains but I Don't know if the specifications like noise specifications still held with the mains I Don't Probably you know they designed this thing well, earth and of course system grounding. very important.

So that's why they're strapping this earth over to here like this. and it had various odd expansion controls. As I said, like you get multiple eye expansion shows, ease to put that on there, digital I/o external control and all that sort of jazz. Now it's actually got a dip switch here for 16 or 15 bit sampling mode normally I if you're just recording the signal, you put it in 16 bit acquisition mode.

so a 16 bit ADC but you could also put it in 15 bit mode. Of course your sacrifice you know a whole bit. but that bit what you can do with that is actually you can feed in an external digital signal. So let's say you had some sort of sensor that you know.

check the like there, the rotational direction of some motor that you're testing or something like that. Then you could actually record. use that as a digital like a just a one channel logic analyzer so to speak. They've actually recorded along with your analog data.

There's all the sample rates and things like that, durability of the battery pack. They tell you everything, the test signals, how you could actually search for stuff and things like that. And of course we've got the window down in here so you can actually see the digital audio tape doing its business in there. see if there's any jams and stuff like that.

So this was much better than like analogue our recorders so you could store all your analog stuff on. error corrected either. Use Double Reed Solomon error correction on the digital audio tape so restores it digitally and you can also of course output readout put analog wires, but of course you'd get maybe some loss there. or you could extract the data out digitally via a PC and they had Windows 95 software that went along with this that allowed you to analyze everything.

Very cool bit of kids. I'm gonna violate my rule and turn it on before I Take it apart cuz who knows what state this is going to be after a teardown and it's going through a calibration routine now and you'll actually see it. The LEDs will light up, It'll go sixteen channels, eight, four and then two here as a bar graph and then it's actually got like a bar graph indicator on here as well for monitoring the inputs and stuff like that. Like each individual wire channel, you can see whether there we go, eight little drop down to four.

It's doing a calibration check on all those channels so you know pretty advanced bit of kit so are actually in eight channel mode at the moment. hence why we've just got the eight indicators there and then these would go up and down to match the input. It's like a just a like an you know, audio spectrum analyzer so to speak. Except they're not frequencies.

they're individual wire channels. You know, tape time and stuff like that source. how many hours? how long has been going for your input voltage range, which my channel you're monitoring on the output tape ID and all sorts of advanced stuff. It's very cool whether or not you got any overloads, test signals, everything else.

And as far as arrangers went, I mean manual. We're arranging mode at the moment. No point. five was the lowest range, but with a 16-bit converter that was pretty sweet.

One two, five up to 20 volt range. The screen actually does look a lot better than what I did before I Just had it at a very low angle. Why? compared to my overhead studio lights here? But yeah, there's a nice funky retro green background on it. Actually, this is interesting.

Forgot all about this. it's actually got it. Was in Power Save mode before, so switches off the backlight. who to conserve battery power, but hey, that's important.

You're out in the field and you're doing hours worth of measurements. You know you can come a gutter. And of course, for system flexibility, you can set the input range individually on all of the 16 channels. Okay, let's void this warranty.

Looks like this lid is gonna pop off and wearing like Flynn Oh Check it out, look at the shielding mesh. Oh so that's really interesting. Look at that particular mesh they've got on top. It reminds me like a vote.

like a rather larger aperture microwave oven. and there's just two screws holding that. Why you need that with the metal top on the thing? I I Don't know. it's it's lower impedance.

It's wow. That could be one of the reasons why they're serious about her. the dust collection. Um, they're serious about that.

DC to DC converter. Look at that made in Japan Of course by Sony And the not only is that completely shielded in there, does it have a I think it's got a temp sensor on the outside as well? Look at that. Oh wow. They're really doing the business.

so obviously they want to keep the crap out of the instrumentation. Which is what you'd expect because this is a 16-bit precision instrumentation recorder. And of course you know you need because of the dynamic range of this thing. The large voltage range is the 20 volt ranges that we saw before.

You know it's all powered from a single battery. much lower voltage. You need the DC to DC converters to generate the required rails, but geez, they got to town there and looks like a whole bunch of plastic package under there. Look at that.

so are they linear regulators on the output? Probably. You start to see the modular our construction of this. We've got our digital audio tape out at tape recorder up here, of course. Sony Invented the digital audio tape in 1987.

It's their thing. And then we've got the adapt controller down here. and as is typical, was seen in many Sony tear downs. They like a role in their own silicon, so there you go.

that's whatever. Like that's the like. Is that like motor drive and all that sort of jazz going directly into the digital audio tape, but they would have like used that across multiple products. It wasn't just designed for this, you know.

Wiring down in here looks neat and tidy. You can see the attention to detail. They've got the bypass caps there on the external DC supply. it's all nicely crimp, plugged and all that sort of jazz cable tie-back neat.

For those who love seeing inside their digital audio tape, look at the little spinny cleaner there. look at that. Very nice. Anyway, it's yeah, we've got ourselves.

Oh, there you go. They're probably positioned. The reason that they've got the metal spokes on the air is that they're getting positional information on that as it spins around, so they know the exact location of the tape and whatnot. For those who like heads, there you go, spinny spinny And of course you've got all the requisite pinch rollers that are gonna move in and out.

hence all those and you can see the shafts in there. I Wish I do have a digital audio tape I Don't haven't I done another teardown of a debt thing anyway. I do have a tape somewhere but I can't find it. So anyway, when not gonna be able to get that puppy working, it's actually a very nice combination of look flat flex connector board up here, going to various motors and sensors and drivers and whatnot.

and looks like we've got a drive motor down here and all the requisite cogs and everything else. Beautiful. It's a Sony There's our front panel board. We've just got some my keypad encoder stuff there.

There's our LCD driver board Hitoshi driving chipset or fairly standard. Once again, they're taking grounding and decoupling to ground. So serious. These are the battery contacts here and they're decoupling all of those directly to the shezzy ground.

Nice. Okay, let's have a look at the bottom. da beam mooned shielding again and that's just a some sort of insulating sheet perhaps? Hmm. so it clearly wasn't good enough to just use the back metal case for the shielding.

They wanted a more localized, lower impedance ground. Now let's have a look at the bottom. Now we're talking. Check that out.

Wow Double-sided loaded of course. And here's all the analog channels actually. Well, that's only. um, eight of them.

Where's the rest? Where's Wally? Must be on the other side? They double-sided Maybe there's two channels per thing? Yeah, unfortunately. I can't remove that shield for you I Don't believe this is in working condition. so I don't want to go desoldering that whole can. but you know you can expect and log each type stuff under there.

Just like here. Got a whole bunch of passives and everything else and see all the red stuff under the components here. each individual one. that's all the glue that holds down the components when they wave solder the bottom half of this board because yes, this is a wave solder board.

You can tell from these solder feeding pads the large ones on the end that sort of leach away the solder as the as it flows over the solder bar. Fender prevents shorts, but each one of those are components glued down and I can't get a good shot at the front panel. PCB You actually have to take much more of it away to actually get that, but you can see the input here. it's got RFI that's the that's the BNC that's the back of the BNC connector.

You can see the RFI bead, they're going down, looks like they have another inductor up there by the looks of it and it's all then individually. a coax wired over to the board up here which we are saw which then has the metal can and that's obviously the front end amplifiers on the thing we've got to coax is going into each connector there. so obviously this is a pair of channels. Hang on, Hang on, it's gonna flip.

Yes Sony the Masters of the PCB flip are not quite mastering more shielding. Once we get all the CAO axes off, we're going to be in like Flynn on the top side of that data acquisition board, which is the thing I'm really interested in. Well, this is interesting. We can flip it out and that one of these I think probably the only border board interconnect they've got in here.

Is this what I can't remember though is that the digital I/o digital I/o connector at the back actually goes into the back of that board. So someone went oh yeah. I don't want this wiring bug of that I want a your board board to interconnect and got away with that, but there's the main board. Oh look, see I think they're our ABCs Check it out.

That metal can did actually lift off there and now we can see we've got how. Here's our input starting over here and we've got a couple of relays: one per right channel. I've got a couple of Op amps in there I'll get the part numbers on those or obviously this looks like this is probably the ADC I'll have to look it up. this is probably the DAC On the other side, we've got a couple of trimmers in there two per channel and these output Co axes here go down to the analog output.

That's why it tells. like the BNC S on the side, there's 16 channel, so that's why that one is probably the DAC there. and there's a couple of trimmers up the top. there.

Naught point 5. It's probably setting. Are they set in like range levels? or I know voltage referee. Go five volts.

So that's some sort of voltage riff for the ADC or something perhaps. And that company Esashi Kasai I've heard of it somewhere, but my memory completely fails me. It's actually a Sachi Microsystems which is part of a much bigger group which is been going on for like a fifty year old company or so actually 1922. I Think they started absolutely crazy.

Anyway, don't know if they're still in business. take it. I Have emerged, done whatever. Um, but they had a semiconductor thing and maybe they were contracted by Sony to custom make this thing.

Maybe they already had it and they based it around this. obviously our 16 bit ADC We don't know. Well as it turns out a shy kasaya or however you want to pronounce it. Um, they're a huge no wonder.

I had like a rung a bell there. like an 18 billion dollar a year company. And they're in two chemicals, home health care, fibers, electronics, locate, construction, materials, services, engineering. They actually commercialize the first lithium-ion battery in cooperation with Sony Actually, they still do our LSI's Hall effect ICS and the word sort of stuff.

and they've even still got their micro electronics division still exists and still make our premium audio dax. So the one we're looking at here, the A K43 28 has been discontinued. but Cirrus Logic well, Crystal Semiconductor / Cirrus Logic make the Cs 43-28 so it's like I Well I don't know whether it's under licence or what the deal is with that. but anyway, yeah, they're still around this door thing.

Look it up. You can't get anything thing for the original company, but the Cirrus Logic CSR 43-28 that is certainly available and that's a dual stereo audio DAC Exactly what you suspect and how those chips are. actually. How good old.

74 HCR they're 7 4 HC 4352 They're like jewel multiplexes or whatever. So there you go. They've got another A Punjabi in there. I Said my pepper.

Yeah, that's got Eight One Two on it. and if you look up saying analog devices ad Eight One two that's actually like a matched pair of like me for amplification like front end something like that. Is that how they're doing it? So all this stuff in here is support stuff for the data acquisition. front end hall 7 4 HC series stuff.

but hello or UTI TMS 320 Fanboys is our DSP looks like a couple of that. On to some memory there. What's that? Mitsubishi job? Yes. Ram Not actually particularly fussed with the rest of it, especially that main logic board down in the bottom down there.

That's just going to be like you know, the the main processor for like the digital interface stuff and driving the LCD and all that sort of stuff. It requires a significant effort to take apart the rest of this. I'm afraid. So I don't think I bother I Just wanted to see the basically the front end stuff, the construction and the shielding and all the other goodness which goes into the systems engineering to this thing.

So as I mentioned, you can imagine, like what your options were in the mid night is what? What are your options these days? If you've got a like whole bunch of sensors you know a dozen or two sensors from people are still doing shock and vibration testing, acoustic testing, and all that sort of stuff. It's still big business. I'm still a very big need for that, if not more these days and there. What do you do? How do you record all these sensors? Year you could get like data acquisition cars for the Pcs.

but so they have nice BNC interfaces. Do they have the they're probably got the dynamic range. Probably got the electrical specs and things to do it. but did they have the nice interfaces and everything else? and how do you do it? Um, there weren't too many options back then and this was one of the obvious and best and state-of-the-art options to measure multi-channel low frequency sensor data and to not only record it, but then play it back into a PC and then analyze it further.

It was like fantastic stuff. I Mean there were models are before this one but this one sort of like became the de facto industry standard. Everyone used it. and the good thing about tearing down something like this as you can see that they haven't cut corners.

This is not a consumer bit of kit. price really didn't matter. the market paid for what it was, you know the product of what it was worth. It basically was like little if nothing else that could really do the job.

So yeah it didn't really matter and they spared no expense on this thing and it shows. And you can bet your bottom dollar. As we saw with like a lot of the grounds and things like that in here they you know really very a careful attention to detail in in terms of you know signal fidelity, noise, ground in, dynamic range, all that sort of stuff. There would have been a lots of little small touches that went into the design of this in to ensure it had the best possible performance.

So I think I'll leave that tear down there I Want to I put it back together requires a lot of effort to get further with minimal sort of its value. Add there in terms of that up, all the electrons are going to fall outs upside down. but there you go. I Hope you enjoyed that.

Look at a very specialized bit of kit from a division of Sony which you probably had no idea existed. probably had no idea there were specialist instrumentation data recorders like this and you can still buy these sort of things. You might even be able to buy tape based ones. and there's still a good second-hand market for these old.

Sony the instrumentation recorders which date from like the early to mid 90s. As I said, these were the industry standard for anything involving you know, a low frequency audio, acoustics, vibration shock you know all that sort of you know, transducer, underwater sonar type stuff which is down in the low frequency ranges because the industry I spent a lot of years in was like two Kilohertz was hate like RF right? So you know everything was like really low frequency stuff, you know? DC the two Kilohertz type stuff and we use these. These were the industry standard data recorders, so a fantastic little bass and a lot of engineering goes into there. And as I said, if you know what these things originally were priced at I'll see if I can google maybe some prices, but I doubt if we'll find anything.

but if you know, please leave it down below. So what's actually available to do this today? Well I just went to a random DAC log systems in the UK They're like a supplier of these types of data acquisition systems and if you go into obsolete systems down here, we can have a look here, we go. Tada recognise anything. The PC 200 series Sony By the way, they did follow up the 200 series with the Sir 1000 which is just basically the same.

Well, a similar thing is just upgraded. If they have the new and new version of the software, the PC Scan 3 or whatever it was called. But anyway, what do they have these days? Let's have a look at standalone portable data loggers. You probably saw one there.

Ah, this job'. Teac Who would have thought Teac right? Look at this beast. Look at this. There you go.

A 16 channel instrumentation wideband data recorder. Is that like? does that record the hard drive? Surely, they don't still use that your one one, one terabyte of data. Flexible memory system. Yep.

flash memory card. all that sort of stuff. There you go. Recording time: 38 hours still battery-powered Look at the size of these things.

Absolutely enormous. And they most probably come with interfaces for direct vibration and shock sensors using the ICP interface or something. Does it say that down here? I'm sure they would if you look them up. Probably some of them do, so that wouldn't surprise me at all.

There's other companies Teac or they produce a smaller version. These are the little portable, rugged sort of with rubber baby buggy bumpers on the side of them. There you go, look at that if they got ICP interfaces. Anyway, it wouldn't surprise me because the problem with if you wanted to hook them up with vibration or shock you know Excel accelerometers then you had to have a like a 16 channel accelerometer ICP amplifier kind of thing depends on the sensor you had.

You had to have that in series with the Co axis. but a lot of these have that built in there just like a voltage you know driving down the line and then just taps off the AC signal kind of thing. So a lot of them will have that sort of stuff built in these days. But there you go.

like you can still buy these badass leave these badass looking systems. They're great that who knew? So I Hope you enjoyed that. Look at a bit of an unusual bit of like state-of-the-art instrumentation. If you did, please give it a big thumbs up.

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