Mackie Ribbon cable maintenance

[Rodgre]

Well I finally bit the bullet and opened up the beast.

It took me about twenty minutes to take the bottom plate off of a Mackie 24-8E and witness the dreaded *ribbon cables. I reseated each one and gave them a shot of ProGold G5 while they were off. A few connectors were under the board, so I couldn't reach them, but I got most of them.

It took me twenty minutes.

Now the board works perfectly.

So for all of you who were scared that it would take days to do, or that it would be out of your skill level.... go ahead. Take off the bottom plate, carefully pull up each connection, one at a time, and squirt some cleaner in there, reseat it (I reseated them a few times to work in the cleaner/lubricant) and button the thing up.

Finis. No replacing cables. No months at the service center. No dealing with Mackie support.

I will post some photos soon. That's the main thing that kept me from doing it sooner. I didn't know what to expect inside. I couldn't find an online step-by-step guide with photos.

Roger

*For those of you who don't know, many Mackie analog 8 bus consoles suffer from ribbon cables and connectors failing over time, exhibiting strange issues like distorted or dead channels, auxes that don't work, mix b not functioning correctly, busses and channels being mismatched in level, etc. Most, if not all of these issuse have been found to be the fault of the internal ribbon cables.

[emrr]

I found with some Mackies that you may have to re-visit this fix every few months. But it's always worked for me.