My questions to You: Did You order the chip as samples directly from the TI site () and how long did it take to ship? Was the soldering process explicetly painful? I surely don't want to give up this nice device, and if the Firewire PCB might get damaged i should still have a working analog mixer. Right now i am considering to give this chip a shot, i am not completely new to soldering in general, but have zero experience in the SMD field… well, lotsa old PC stuff flying around to practice on it. So, further research led me to Your blog post here and the part which most likely must have been damaged during the action, it appears to be same PHY (TSB41AB2PAPG4) as on Your device. I did some research on that matter, Alesis support told me that these mixers are not supported anymore, nor are there any replacement parts left (except from this site you can get a replacement board which costs more than i actually paid for the whole mixer. Nothing more, no recognition or anything else. Since then, no reply from the firewire part of the device, only in Linux i got some sort of reply: when i restarted the device, dmesg told me that the firewire bus has resetted. The exact same thing happened to me a few days ago with my good old trusted Multimix 8 Firewire (), don't know how i managed it, but somehow i plugged in the firewire cable 180° while the device was switched on…stupid me.

Hey Chris, excellent work and great post! The two shorted pins #1 and #2 are both GND, so I did not bother to clean up the blob. Then the interface should be functioning again (I did not populate the mechanically damaged connector and associated terminating resistors, one port is enough for me). The only way to repair it is to desolder the chip, and replace it with a new one. One of the ports had one receiver line stuck at 0V (chip-internal short to GND). It's described in the data sheet of the chip, here it's a TSB41AB2 from TexasInstruments In my case one bias-voltage-regulator spat out 3.3V, the other 0V (there's one for each of the two firewire ports). They are supposed to be biased to a internally generated 1/2 Vcc (~1.8V) via 56 Ohm resistors from the twisted-pair lines to a bias pin (TBIAS0/1). On top, it carries a switching power supply generating the internal voltages (+3.3V, +5V, +/-15V and +48V from a single, galvanically isolated 9.30V input) which is missing in the photo.Ī good way to diagnose these kind of errors (according to some forums and FAQs) is to look at the idle-voltage on the firewire-bus lines (TPA0+.TPA0-.). It connects with flat cables to the 'analog' boards.

The lower one has the DSP, Firewire controller and a ARM based controller. There's a stack of two PCBs (only the lower one shown) on the left side inside. Thankfully the internal layout of the device is pretty clean.

Preamps alesis io26