Genelec died, advice needed

[ChrisTanakaCanwell]

One of my 1031A monitors started getting weird on me about a month ago... some white noise would come out of the right speaker intermittently, last for about 20-30 seconds even with no xlr cable plugged in, then get louder near the end before a soft pop and going back to normal. During a session last week it happened again, but now it's louder and not going away.

I e-mailed Genelec about the problem:

The best thing would be to get the unit in here for service.
We have a bench Fee of $150.00.
This price does not include S/H, Parts and Taxes to your State.
I would evaluate it and then contact you with the cost of repair.
If you approve I would then require an CC# to proceed.
Before I can give you an RMA# for return of the product I would need the serial number off the unit plus your address.
We prefer that the unit be shipped in original packing in order to make sure it survives shipping. If you do not have the packaging we can sell a box to you for $35.00 plus shipping.

A guy I work with is pretty good with electronics but not a professional repair tech, and he's thinking it might be a bad cap or something. Should I open it up and poke around with him or bite the bullet and possibly be without a monitor for an undetermined amount of time? (when I sent my interface to Presonus a couple years ago I didn't get it back for months)

 

[B36arin]

Open it up and look at the caps. We have a Dynaudio Air 6 at the studio which started to weird out, the control system started freezing. Dynaudio wanted us to ship the speaker to Denmark, but after talking to support for a while they said that it could be a bad cap in the power supply. You can usually see it straight away on the bigger caps, when the top of them(which is usually flat) has started bulging outwards it's bad. We brought it to our tech and he had it fixed while we had dinner, and now we can go back to mixing

 

[ChrisTanakaCanwell]

Thanks that's good to hear, I'll check it out

 

[Sloan]

Yeah, i was gonna say that sounds like a capacitor issue. You could prob replace all electrolytic caps for cheap and you might as well do the other monitor while your soldering iron is still hot.

 

[colonel kurtz]

yea dude i had an issue a few months back with one of my alesis M1's not wanting to turn on sometimes...and when it did, it gave off an obnoxious high-pitched tone...like an 8k sine wave or something. anyways, it finally completely died, and sure enough a cap in PSU had burst and leaked all over. the leaked cap fluid came off the PCB really easily with some rubbing alcohol, and a couple seconds of soldering straightened out the rest.

alesis wanted $130 for a replacement PSU, when all it needed was $.85 part.

 

[Skaldir]

alesis wanted $130 for a replacement PSU, when all it needed was $.85 part.

+1 but be careful with anything power related, cause you can still die of the current that's still in there.

 

[ChrisTanakaCanwell]

Well I opened it up and didn't notice any bulged caps. Gonna order new ones and hope for the best

 

[sixstringhotshot88]

yes. be carful with capacitors.

from experience it doesn't feel very nice when you get zapped

 

[ChrisTanakaCanwell]

I tried to drain the voltage with a multimeter but nothing was charged. Weird

 

[Riku]

I'd say send it back to Genelec Inc. I used to work for Genelec (in Finland) and know these inside and out. If you start messing around too much with it then you'll knock it out of calibration and then it'll just sound sh!t.

 

[ChrisTanakaCanwell]

I ended up not being able to find the exact parts online so i bit the bullet and sent both speakers to Genelec They ended up replacing the exact caps I was going to and "touching up some solder joints". Sucks that I could have saved a lot of money and not had to ship them to/from the east coast but at least I know they're in optimal shape now. FWIW, I had to temporarily borrow my old A7s (which I had been using for years) and now I'm 100% sure I prefer the sound of the 1031s.

 

[Sloan]

Thanks for the update post!