[comp.sys.mac.hardware] SID II kit arrives, works!

dplatt@coherent.com (Dave Platt) (07/04/90)

My SID II kit arrived in yesterday's mail.  After several hours of
careful soldering and clipping, and the correction of one mis-
interpretation on my part, the kit came alive and digitized its first
few sounds.  Using the on-board mike, the audio quality was very good
(especially at 22 kHz).

Kudos to Mike Ciholas for putting this kit together.  It's a very nice
piece of work... definitely a class act!

[My misinterpretation?  When connecting wires from the mike and line
 jacks to the PC board, the instructions say to run wires from the
 "rightmost" solder lugs on the jacks to the PC-board pads nearest them.
 You should interpret "rightmost" in the sense of "towards the right, as
 you look at the board from beneath".  I interpreted it as "towards the
 'right' side of the board, as 'right' was defined at the beginning of
 the instructions... it's in the right side as you look at the board
 from the top."

 The two wires I installed originally connected the barrel of the jack
 to the nearby ground pads on the PC board... these connections appear
 to be unnecessary, since the jack is already grounded by its washer and
 nut, but they don't appear to be harmful either.  The lugs which
 actually carry the audio signals through the jacks were left
 unconnected... so the line-level gain stage saw no signal and simply
 converted a subtle hissing sound.

 Once I connected two additional wires to the "right" lugs, as Mike had
 intended, the kit worked fine.]