The Studer A-800 is a GREAT machine...
The transport is killer, the audio electronics well designed
and overall it's perhaps the best sounding Studer ever built.
But they can be quirky!!!
Note that Studer no longer supports the A-800 in any way - no tech help, no parts, no nothing....
So parts will be difficult to find from now (2008) on...
In theory "Audiohouse" in Switzerland has the old Studer A-800 parts and will sell them,
so give them a try.... Audiohouse
We only have New Pinch Rollers for the Studer A-800 and nothing else !!!
Please don't ask for other parts - we don't have them !
Here are some helpful tips I've found over the past 25 years working on Studer machines...
First off, there are a ton of Molex connectors in the A-800....
and these have to be cleaned regulary.... once a month for busy studios.
Take the audio card-cage down to get to the molex connectors, remove them one at a time,
spray clean the sockets and press the connectors firmly together....
Then after all the connectors have been cleaned, you MUST test ALL the audio functions!!!
You'll find that some of the connectors aren't making good contacts...
and for those you'll have to go in and physically tighten up the contacts....
making the female connectors slightly smaller and/or the male pins slightly larger.
Note that it's important to re-pin the Power Molex connectors from time to time -
they can develop corrosions and cause problems.... if the molex connector is slightly 'brown'
that indicates that at one time the connection was so bad the pins started to heat up,
so replace those pins and the connector itself.
Once you think you've got all the conectors tight and good, brush your fingers over
the Molex connectors while monitoring the audio, and see if any channels become intermittant...
if so, then you will have to pull out the connector and try to tighten up the pins and sockets once again...
This can be a frustrating job...
but the goal is a good reliable machine, so you just have to spend some time on this....
Next you need to learn the 'feel' of the transport control buttons -
they have a tendency to go bad now and then, and you need to know when one is about to fail...
there should be a good solid 'click' to the button, and it should bounce back after being pressed.
There are switches on the power supplies that set the VU Meter lamp brightness...
these you should set to 'low'.
Note that the A-800 is a micro-processor controlled machine....
it's basically a computer, but it's getting OLD... it's a 20 year old computer now,
and chips do fail, EPROMs loose their memory, and strange things can start to happen.
Make a list of the various chips in the control system, and make sure that you
have a couple chips of each kind sitting around... some you may find hard to find,
but it's better to try and find them now, then when the machine's not working...
some chips will take hours of searching to find, but do it now!!
Make a Back-up set of your EPROMs... they will go out one day.
The Studer A-800 Power Supplies often need repairs...
they fail now and then, so make sure you have the transistors and
caps on hand for possible future repairs.
Note that the cost of Studer heads is high - way too high for most studios to afford
to replace heads once they're gone. Check to see if you have the 'Long-Life' heads, and hope that you do...
and make sure that the tape lifters are pushing the tape away from the heads in wind modes!!
Often you can find A-800's with worn pinch rollers.... sometimes all you have to do
is change the order of the rollers on their shaft, but once again they're getting old,
and they should be replaced as soon as you can afford it. Yes, I sell them!!
Buy a few spare transport buttons right now before they disappear !!!
The A-800 is old enough now so that various electrolytic caps are going bad...
If you find that you are replacing one value cap in cards, go ahead and
replace that cap in each card.... they're cheap and this will save you time and headaches
in the near future.
Finally.... disable the 'rehearse' function of your A-800.
If the Rehearse command line starts fluctuating because of noisy or bad chips
you will either get no Record function at all, or worse recordings that
cut in and out as the Rehearse command comes and goes on it's own.
So disable it, you will almost never need the Rehearse mode anyway!!!