I’ve been doing some more work on the Fairlight and trying to figure out what is causing the fuse to keep blowing. This time I’ve been hunting for the power supply, and it’s an interesting hunt. First step is to remove the back panel, which I’ve done before, lets reveal part of the power supply, the part with all the heat sinks and big power transistors used for the linear power supply. And yup, they are big, keep in mind this thing has a LOT of power, 24V at 5A, 12V at 2A, -12V at 2A and not forgetting the 5V at 16A, yes 16amps! That is a lot of…

So I decided to check a few of the PCBs, now this is a IIx so it should have voice cards with CEM3320 filters on, but no matter where I look I cannot find them. After a bit of digging, it seems the owner says it was a I, then upgraded to a II and then a IIx, but it looks like they kept the voice cards from the I. This uses a switched capacitor style VCF (top left using a 4066 and a 4136 quad op-amp). A friend shared a picture of his Fairlight II voice board and the CEM3320 is on the bottom left (you can see the…

So, I’ve been asked to fix a Fairlight series IIx, I don’t often do repairs but the chance to actually use one of these rare beasts was too much to turn down. Now I have removed the cover on this before the picture, it’s sat on top. This Fairlight died in the late 90s and has been left like it since, every time you power it on it blows the mains fuse, a 3.15A anti surge fuse. So before power it up again, I removed all the cards, and disconnected all the internal power harnesses (floppy drives, etc). My concern is that something on one of the cards, keyboard(s) or…