Well, he kind of fancied himself an "expert." Keep in mind that this was a long time ago when a 16 channel mixer for $799 was a steal. Today that's a laughably high price especially given the technology in use.Jace-BeOS wrote:Wow, that's kind of an awesome story, in a sadly amusing way. I'm glad Alesis took pity on him. I think the culture of demanding non-electronics experts to maintain PC hardware internals has had a net negative impact on culture. Really, only electronics experts should be disassembling electronics. The PC world pressures people to think it's normal to disassemble and "maintain" sealed electronics.ghettosynth wrote: Not so for my friends and bandmates though, as previously discussed. Another friend owned a (small and local, but with paying customers) studio and he was using two of those horrible Alesis 16 channel mixers, the 1622. Well, he was lecturing his young assistant on the importance of proper cleaning procedures for electronic gear and they took one of the mixers apart. Now these mixers do not have proper pots, they have the carbon for the pots painted onto the PCB. That's why they were so cheap when they came out. My friend proceeds to use some corrosive electronics cleaner, I don't recall which one, to clean them and there are huge swaths of what look like black ink as he's wiping it down. At first he thought that it was just dirty and continued to lecture his charge that this was clearly an important thing to do. Then the PCBs were totally clean. He called Alesis and they explained to him that he had wiped off all of the potentiometers and that the board was essentially trash.
Fortunately for him, they were sympathetic, and also amused, and sent him a replacement board. Yes, I laughed at him.
I remember being as arrogant with respect to my actual skills when I was about eight and offered to fix my sister's toy washing machine that she just got for Christmas. I managed to get it completely apart, there were a LOT of screws in that thing. Of course, I wasn't able to put it back together, nor fix it. I had no idea where most of those screws went. My parents were pissed and I got yelled at. On the bright side, my dad couldn't put it back together either and I was able use the battery box from her washing machine to fix my hot-wheels super booster. So it wasn't a total loss.