d8b Forum

I received two Mackie d8b's that were once part of a TV broadcast operation. They were taken out of service about 10 years ago and have been sitting in storage. I have been able to fire them up, but when I feed them audio, either from mics, tone generators, line sources... I get nothing on any given input channel. No levels on the meters. The system is running v3 of the software.

What should I start checking on, step by step, to figure out what is going on?

Are the CPU's mated to a particular control surface? Could I possibly have them switched?

Is this a CPU problem or a control surface problem?

Any help would be appreciated.

It shouldn't matter which CPU for this issue. It would if you were trying to get 3rd party plugins to fire but your issue is not the CPU.,This sound like a clocking issue to me. Check to see if you have a clock card in the unit. The 2 track returns A,B,C will pass audio, as recall, without clock. If you get nothing there, you have other issues.

You aren't getting any "Error 43" messages anywhere are you? Is it booting fully. You might want to look into your BIOS settings as well if they sat for 10 years. It will require you replacing the motherboard battery and changing the bios settings to what is listed in the database based on your processor. Don't go in and load default, there are settings specific to the console.

Start with these two issues and see where you land. Good luck.

My money is on Crash's point of there being no clock card... or if there is one, it's faulty.

Peter

After considerable reading on this board and the maintenance section... I finally went into setup, and selected the internal clock rather than the Apogee Word Clock... viola... it now works.

BTW, does the Apogee Word Clock need an external timing source?

You can choose, hence the BNC connectors.

Peter

If you can find an Apogee card for the desk, in case you don't already have one, I would suggest getting one. It makes clocking with other digital gear easier than without. You can clock over ADAT optical with the OPT.8 cards but I have always found that to be be hit and miss in my experience.