Back before 2000, I bought a Cambridge Soundworks FPS 2000 in Berkely to go along with my Creative SoundBlaster Live. To this day I think it was one of the best purchases I made. The price wasn't too much for the time, and the sound was awesome for the price. So good was it that I still have it to this day.
Unfortunately as time has passed it suffered some damage. I first had to replace the volume connector due to a bad connection, which ended up being easy because it's just a PS/2 connector. The recent issue was more complicated. While playing music the volume would randomly go soft, and then eventually roar back on its own. Given it was a periodic issue I felt like it must be due to an issue similar that what I fixed on my Polk subwoofer. So I took it apart, and wow were there a lot of electrolytic capacitors.
Unfortunately as time has passed it suffered some damage. I first had to replace the volume connector due to a bad connection, which ended up being easy because it's just a PS/2 connector. The recent issue was more complicated. While playing music the volume would randomly go soft, and then eventually roar back on its own. Given it was a periodic issue I felt like it must be due to an issue similar that what I fixed on my Polk subwoofer. So I took it apart, and wow were there a lot of electrolytic capacitors.
Here's a partial list:
main board
c3 + c3a + c3b + c3c + c2a + c14 + + c4c + c4 + c4b +c11 c4a + c3: 1uf 50v
c39: 10uf 35v
c40: 100uf 16vc41: 100uf 25vc42: 220uf 25v
c26 + c25: 470uf 16vc22: 470uf 25v
c42: 220uf 25vc27: 47uf 25v
c33 c30 c28: 4700uf 25v
side board
c100a: 470uf x4 16vc102: 10uf 35v
c101: 0.47 50v
So I went ahead and bought a "few" capacitors and a tester:
I took my Hakko 808 (https://www.hakkousa.com/products/desoldering/hakko-808-desoldering-tool-6069.html desoldering gun, which makes light work of removing parts, not sure what the best replacement is, perhaps this):
went ahead and opened it up and found this little guy (C42) in there that looked suspicious:
You'll note the top of the capacitor has a small hole and some yellow gunk. Also suspicious in that it's a different color than most of the other capacitors. I put it in the tester (I have to say this little guy is really neat) and measured this:
This guy is supposed to be 220 uF and not pF so something is very wrong with it. I went ahead replaced it, put it all back together and success! :) Hope this helps someone!
As an update this didn't work very well, I had to replace the volume/power variable resistor/switch and now it really works well.
