Hey pinball people!
A few weeks ago Wong and I were chatting and he sent me a pinside thread that was discussing the really nasty sound all WPC games make from the speakers when the games are turned off. Mike said that all his WPC games do this but his Creech was particularly bad and it was driving him crazy. For anyone here that owns a WPC game (pre WPC-95) they know exactly what I'm talking about, it's like nails on a chalkboard! (I've hated this noise as long as I have been a collector) I told Mike it's unfortunately a problem with the sound board design, and there used to be a product made by a collector YEARS ago that would eliminate this nasty power down artifact, and sure enough this came up in the pinside thread. Unfortuantely this product was no longer available, so Wong gave me the idea to look into producing my own version.
Now, just for reference here is a picture of the previous product that was available installed in a FT and you can see it screwed to the back of the lamp insert.
Over the past few weeks I've worked on designing my own version, trying to make some improvements over the previous iterations that were available and after two rounds of prototyping I now have a cool little product that I'm happy with.
As you can see, it's quite a bit smaller and it installed directly onto the sound PCB power connector. No more screwing anything down anywhere in the head! I also designed this to work on both WPC89 and WPC-DCS sound boards even though the DCS boards are not affected nearly as bad as the WPC89 boards. (The previous version only worked on WPC89 sound pcbs)
Here are a couple of quick shots of the installation, which literally takes less than 1 minute.
It fits in neat and tidy between the sound and driver PCB's with enough space to keep everyone happy.
And here are a couple of quick vids showing pre and post install power downs with my first prototype.
Pre install
Post Install
As of right now I'm posting this up to get the word out, as I am toying with running a batch of these. Cost at this point will be $40 USD plus shipping for the WPC version and $45 USD for the WPC-DCS version and will come with their respective PCB and all the wire harnesses so it's a completely plug and play system. I have to run 100 of them to make it worth doing so for those interested drop me a PM and I will start compiling a pre-order list.
Any other questions, post away.
D
A few weeks ago Wong and I were chatting and he sent me a pinside thread that was discussing the really nasty sound all WPC games make from the speakers when the games are turned off. Mike said that all his WPC games do this but his Creech was particularly bad and it was driving him crazy. For anyone here that owns a WPC game (pre WPC-95) they know exactly what I'm talking about, it's like nails on a chalkboard! (I've hated this noise as long as I have been a collector) I told Mike it's unfortunately a problem with the sound board design, and there used to be a product made by a collector YEARS ago that would eliminate this nasty power down artifact, and sure enough this came up in the pinside thread. Unfortuantely this product was no longer available, so Wong gave me the idea to look into producing my own version.
Now, just for reference here is a picture of the previous product that was available installed in a FT and you can see it screwed to the back of the lamp insert.
Over the past few weeks I've worked on designing my own version, trying to make some improvements over the previous iterations that were available and after two rounds of prototyping I now have a cool little product that I'm happy with.
As you can see, it's quite a bit smaller and it installed directly onto the sound PCB power connector. No more screwing anything down anywhere in the head! I also designed this to work on both WPC89 and WPC-DCS sound boards even though the DCS boards are not affected nearly as bad as the WPC89 boards. (The previous version only worked on WPC89 sound pcbs)
Here are a couple of quick shots of the installation, which literally takes less than 1 minute.
It fits in neat and tidy between the sound and driver PCB's with enough space to keep everyone happy.
And here are a couple of quick vids showing pre and post install power downs with my first prototype.
Pre install
Post Install
As of right now I'm posting this up to get the word out, as I am toying with running a batch of these. Cost at this point will be $40 USD plus shipping for the WPC version and $45 USD for the WPC-DCS version and will come with their respective PCB and all the wire harnesses so it's a completely plug and play system. I have to run 100 of them to make it worth doing so for those interested drop me a PM and I will start compiling a pre-order list.
Any other questions, post away.
D
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