power line conditioner

[venuetech]

This is all water under the bridge as it happened some twenty years ago
but i have never have had an answer to the problem i was having.

years ago i had a Mini Light Pallet that was plugged into a power line conditioner as strand specified. All that was fine and good until the final dress rehearsal for nutcracker and suddenly BINK!!! total loss of all keyboard control. only thing to do was to load the show onto a 24 channel mantrix and move on. Then air freight the MLP off for a winter vacation in So Cal.

IT DID THIS THREE YEARS IN A ROW. same show, same designer,

some time after that i returned the power line conditioner to the manufacturer for service as it had stopped working. never had a problem after that.

a few years later a vendor mentioned some problems with the line conditioners that strand specified.

my ears perked up on that note but i could not get much more info from him.

that board (and the conditioner) is long gone at this point but the events did much to change my opinion of manufactures.

any thoughts?

 

[DimmerDotCom]

You brownout an old MLP or MLP2 and you can kiss your setup goodbye. I never understood power conditioners versus ups arguments back then. Cost savings?

What exactly use to happen to your MLP? Die completely? Scrambled nonsense screen? Lose show and setup?

 

[derekleffew]

...Scrambled nonsense screen? ...

One of my favorites: on the original Strand-Century Light Palette, (can't remember the condition that caused this; it may have been on every startup), both screens would fill with

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

When I would rent an MLP, we never sent a surge protector, power conditioner, or UPS along. I'm not sure we knew what those were in those days.

Oh, and, if I recall correctly, the screens would automatically blank during a disk record. This "feature" was added because it was found that EMI from the CRT s caused issues with recording onto the 5.25" floppy. Gee, our old LaSalle ran great.

 

[DimmerDotCom]

The worse was the LP3. You'll have to remember that these consoles had a unified memory structure. All ram including video was on one page. TO write to video you just wrote to ram. That's also the reason the disk could corrupt your console: they were just a direct memory dump - no real file system per se like we know it with our new fangled Windows PC's and Mac PC's.

 

[venuetech]

What exactly use to happen to your MLP? Die completely? Scrambled nonsense screen? Lose show and setup?

it froze, no key functioned no amount of restarting or rebooting could get any keys to function. the screens would look normal. no submasters functioned.

it became a $22K brick until strand field service installed new cards.

On one occasion the keyboard scrambled, the zero key became the go button, the display keys became various numbers etc. etc. same replace card fix.

We had the thing on a grounded static mat, No help

apart from this it was a great board but it could "BINK" and be gone anytime

 

[chausman]

On one occasion the keyboard scrambled, the zero key became the go button, the display keys became various numbers etc. etc. same replace card fix.

Hide and Go Seek for techs!