I've had a DDR machine for around 6 years or more. It's working ok but there has gradually been an increase in static noise every time the neon likes kick in. It's noticeable on both channels, one side barely and the other side very much.
It's got to the point where it's annoying me too much so I finally made space to start to take it apart and have a look at it.
I started checking the grounds and they all looked good so decided to open it up a bit deeper and have a look at the relay behind the speaker and have a bit of a read on how neons are powered.
The video that I watched suggested that for a neon light the transformer should typically have one output wire going to the start of the neon circuit and a return at the end.
On my cabinet my transformer has two output wires but one has always been taped up.
With the speaker off I was able to have a much look at the wires. I can see one of the neon transformer output wires going into the neon on the speaker side that I have taken off and then it goes off to the other side. When I pulled the wires from the other neon, one of them seems to have just been loose in the cab. I've not took the other speaker off yet but there are no other wires that I can see that look like neon power so I assuming that it's been loose like this all this time and probably that's what's causing the interference.
Does anyone have any suggestion as to why it might be like this. The other output wire on the transformer is taped up solid and was in a different part of the machine so there is no way it was ever connected.
Should I just tape up the loose wire and route it well away from any other wire to see if that fixes the interference as it's been this way for years or should I connect it to the other wire from the transformer to complete the circuit?
Any thoughts would be appreciated
It's got to the point where it's annoying me too much so I finally made space to start to take it apart and have a look at it.
I started checking the grounds and they all looked good so decided to open it up a bit deeper and have a look at the relay behind the speaker and have a bit of a read on how neons are powered.
The video that I watched suggested that for a neon light the transformer should typically have one output wire going to the start of the neon circuit and a return at the end.
On my cabinet my transformer has two output wires but one has always been taped up.
With the speaker off I was able to have a much look at the wires. I can see one of the neon transformer output wires going into the neon on the speaker side that I have taken off and then it goes off to the other side. When I pulled the wires from the other neon, one of them seems to have just been loose in the cab. I've not took the other speaker off yet but there are no other wires that I can see that look like neon power so I assuming that it's been loose like this all this time and probably that's what's causing the interference.
Does anyone have any suggestion as to why it might be like this. The other output wire on the transformer is taped up solid and was in a different part of the machine so there is no way it was ever connected.
Should I just tape up the loose wire and route it well away from any other wire to see if that fixes the interference as it's been this way for years or should I connect it to the other wire from the transformer to complete the circuit?
Any thoughts would be appreciated