Fixing My Amiga's Gateway 2000 ACS410 Speakers

 
Fixing My Amiga's Gateway 2000 ACS410 Speakers


Back in the day my Amiga was hooked up to a nice tuner/8-track/record player with Mitsubishi car speakers. I can remember sneaking down to the basement, turning on the Amiga, climbing up the computer desk so that I could reach the stereos power button... Only to put in a game like Hostage, which had loud noises as soon as it started, scaring me into turning off the machine, lest I got noticed. That thing got a lot out of life, but I believe I ended up dissecting it due to the right audio channel fading out.

When I brought my Amiga back to life around 10 years ago, I ended up hooking it up to a Gateway 2000 speaker system, specifically the ACS410 speaker system. It came from my second PC from 1997, where I also took my Amiga's current CRT monitor from. The sound system is damn good, with 2 main speakers, 2 tweeters, 2 surround speakers that match the mains, and a nice little subwoofer. All of them hook up to the right speaker, but that has been having issues ever since I hooked it up to the Amiga. 
^This one speaker contains the guts to all the others, unscrewing it

It tends to have a lot of volume issues, a garble type of interference when you increase or decrease the volume. The right speaker will cut out all-together on lower volumes and on higher volumes you have to wiggle the volume knob just right until it will come in. A trick I used for quite awhile was to turn it up loud really quick and then back down quicker to the mid range. Once you get it going, don't touch it again! It might not even be perfectly working at that point. You may hear the right channel occasionally miss a note or two that you know should be there, but if it was getting most of it right, it was best to leave well enough alone.

I've fixed things like this before, but it's one of those things that you let tick you off for years until you've finally had enough. You know you can fix it. yet you don't. Some of it is a strange attachment to something  you remember fondly from your youth and not wanting to accidentally screw it up, but it's mostly just a laziness or procrastination taking hold. But there comes a point when enough is enough. Recently I've been making some new music on my Amiga, and not always hearing the notes I was playing was driving me mad. The time had come to operate...
^Came apart fairly easily for my purposes of cleaning the volume contacts

The cabinet was held together by eight Phillips head screws, coming apart very easily at this point to show the speakers motherboard. Along with the motherboard are two identical speakers, one of which is for the Dolby Surround, along with a third tweeter speaker. I ended up abandoning cleaning the cabinet as there's a cover glued in, which means one of the speakers can't be removed without messing with that cover. There were a lot of capacitors in there, all of which were looking good, and the speakers themselves were looking good.

My job was simple enough, I got out some contact cleaner and sprayed the volume knobs. I let it sit for awhile, put it back together, and that moment of truth arrived. I loaded up Wing Commander, set up my camera, and prepared to turn the speakers on. Again, while being near certain it would work, there's always this nagging feeling of impending doom... I turned on the speakers and the power light came on. Slowly I inched up the volume, and slowly the fanfare started to play. Play brilliantly it did. No more garbled interference, just a smooth gradual climb in volume. It was fixed. I can't believe I waited 10 years to do this. Hope you'll check out the surgery itself in my video on this topic.



^Back together and playing some awesome Amiga music

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