SonicArt

Hey guys, I finally pulled out the Vimak and a lot of fingers and got into the refurb, she had been put away for about 5 years and needed the cap replacement service before being reliable again. So I spent a few hours removing all the old caps off the board and replacing them, around 70 of them long job but worth doing it right. DAC came alive with solid lock and sounded great after a couple weeks settling in.

I didnt get to the pwr supply at this time as other jobs and life called me back to reality... Well the pwr supply caps decided they did not like coming out of hybernation and started to leak and cause circuit failure. They smelt like a dead animal which blew me away as I didnt realise at first it was the dac in trouble. Long story short one of the tantalum recitifier bypass caps burnt into the board, and some of the fuses were wrong, (something I never noticed and stupidly never bothered to check) so fuses didnt blow, just kept trickling power into nasty caps LOL.

Stripped the power supply and rebuilt with Panasonic caps, ultra fast diodes, got rid of the old super slow diodes and bypass caps, andhad to dremel out the board where it was burnt as the carbon was shorting out 2 of the pwr rails! She is again up and running and sounds really nice, needs another good week of running but the higher spec caps and rectifiers definitely change things for the better.

Anyway the reason for this post is I never noticed the temperatures of the transformers when the vimak was running, but have been monitoring it since the rebuild as I am paranoid something will short or burn again! The smaller Trannie is running at around 65 degrees C on the core, and 52 degrees on the outer wrapping. The larger Trannie is running in the 40's.

Can someone with a VIMAK DS1800 or 2000 please check your Trannie temps, if the small one is too hot to touch then thats good for me It feeds one circuit with a 3A rated fuse so I expect its doing a fair job in there, I havent been able to find any schematics for VIMAK's anywhere, if someone has any paperwork on them I would love to get a copy!

Hey guys, its been a long while since I have been active in forums or the main audio world in general. Sonic Art has not stopped running, its just been on idle for the past few years while I was immersed in other projects.

Anyway just wanted to let you all know I am busy rebuilding the website, have dropped most of the electronics and will be ramping up the cable and filter range in the coming months, restocking things like the the EVOLUTION AC Mains cable, and doing some production runs of filters.