 Hey everybody, welcome back to Retro Tech. Today is our two-year anniversary special where we're going to celebrate year two of Retro Tech. We're going to go back and we'll look at some of the things that were some of my more important and favorite repairs over the last year. And then I'm going to also show you some brand new footage that you've never seen before when it pertains to things like what happened to the Sony PVM 20L5. Well, if you stick around to the end of this episode, you'll be able to find out what happened to it. And also, I'm going to give you a never-before-seen tour of my lovely, wonderful shop here. I'm going to go around and show you a lot of the CRTs that I have here in the shop. I'll talk about things like the D24s and the lovely Sony PVM 2950Q. What's going to happen to them? Well, you'll find out towards the middle of the video. But first, I want to, again, go jump back in and take a look at some of my favorite repairs from this last year. And one of my favorite most underrated monitors, that's the Sony PVM 1353MD. All right. So first things first, the 53MD is very desirable because not only is it a 600 line TV monitor, but it's pretty easy to service. It's one of the more simple designs for the PVM before they got really complicated in the late 90s and early 2000s. And the good thing about this one is you're going to get a lot of the great features that Sony added, such as a service menu. And this particular model does have a second input on it that can be switched between component and RGB. There is an output on those lines. So you can daisy chain other monitors in and out of this one quite easily. And lastly, the 53MD will generally be sold for a considerably less amount of money than the M2 or the M2MD use or even the L2s, which are all going to be great monitors. But you're getting the same kind of performance out of a properly adjusted 53MD unit. This is a perfect starter monitor for anybody that's trying to get into PVMs. All right, the next monitor I want to feature is the Sony BVM D14H5U that I rebuilt about six to eight months ago. Now, first, I want to say thank you to Urien. Urien actually donated this monitor to me. And when I got it, it didn't really work well at all. The tube was completely used up. So I was able to find another tube and get some good experience with swapping a tube out on a BVM. So thank you, Urien. It was one of my favorite projects this year. I also was able to go through and rebuild the entire chassis for the most part, as well as some of the other minor boards and then give it a good calibration and cleaning. So if you haven't checked that one out, go back and give it a watch. Now, before I get to my tour of my lab, I want to show you one of my favorite tools I found this year. And that was this Klein convergence gauge. So this gauge doesn't actually perform any maintenance itself. What it does is it allows you to track and check any convergence that you want to on your CRT. I bought this one, you know, six to eight months ago for under $100. But I do believe the price has really jumped up on them lately. Now, to do this properly, you want to have a nice line horizontal line pattern across your screen, something that you can easily find in a 240p test suite. Take the lens and put it up to the lines. And it actually isolates the colors. For example, whites can be broken down to blue, green, and red on the lens. And then you could use the adjustment readers on the side and lift the colors such as the red, you could be lifted by using the right hand side. And the blue can be lifted by using the left hand side. And it's just a great all around tool to make any kind of adjustment on your vertical convergence. And also check and see how in spec your monitor is. Hey everybody, welcome back today to a special behind the scenes look at the retro tech studio slash lab. And honestly, it's really just my two car garage in my suburban home. But I thought we'd do a little fun thing here to celebrate kind of the two year anniversary of the channel retro tech. And I just show you kind of around how my shop and everything is set up. Now it's kind of a mess right now. But I wanted to show you some of the items that I've gotten in recently that will eventually be restored hopefully in the next year or year three for retro tech. So you know, this is just a rack that sits behind my a lot of times when I'm shooting and doing some work at some supplies and tools and old games. And this is something that you might have seen in some videos, which is newer Neo Geo MVS CMVS Consolized MVS. So I've not really done a direct video on that thing, but it's a lot of fun. And one of the newer things I've picked up, there's an old Apple computer. I've got a lot of these eight inch monitors in which I've not discussed in a while. These are both this one just does composite in this video, this one's a composite only model. And then over on the other side of the room, I'll show you some more. So coming up, you know, next year, we'll try to get some very good information on the eight inch monitors and kind of the difference between all of them. And then scrolling back here, a lot of people will ask about this is this is the JVC D series, which hopefully will be able to I'm waiting for my modern friend and I do kind of connect and be able to work a little bit together because I wanted him to come out and help me on the D series RGB mod, just so that we both could get a little bit better. He's got some good ideas and I want to involve him in it. This big contraption in front of it isn't actually an old school light for it was from a medical recycling company where I got PVMs from before and I pretty much asked him if he'd throw in this old X-ray light. So it's really cool. You can actually stick papers up in it. If you have a plan, the connection just sits, it holds the papers up like that and you can see real nice. And if you have schematics, you could see through it. And it also provides some good lighting for shots. Occasionally you might see it in the background, but that's that light. And then let's just scroll around here to the other sides of this garage. And so we've got now some of the bigger, more amazing monitors that we'll be covering this year. This is one of my favorite all-time PVMs and that is the Sony 2950Q. Now this one is not mine unfortunately. It belongs to someone who brought it here and there's a pretty interesting story about where it came from, where it's been, and it needs, it works great, but it still needs adjustment and a recap and all that good stuff. So we'll be able to get in there and do that this year on this magnificent Grail level PVM. So that's one of them. And then obviously in the background behind that we've got some other high-end monitors, which I've not gotten to yet. We'll talk about in a second. Now this is an interesting thing here. I bought this off an auction from my local government surplus website, and it was an old convention services table and booth set up with wheels. And this originally would have cost thousands of dollars. It's actually that piece and then the piece that the 2950 is on. It's really high quality made. So I got this for like $10 for the set on auction because they were just wanting to get rid of it. They're very helpful. That pretty much is a good transition over here to the multi-format section of the BVMs here. And well, this first one's just a 14L5, which you've already seen. You guys have definitely seen videos on this one. This is the D-Series 14H5U, which has been completely rebuilt for the most part. Different tube, everything else in it. I've not really shown this one off much. This is an A-Series with very low hours, and I do have two of the three cards for it, not the 61D. I don't have that composite and this video card, but I do have the 68X in here, so I can show you the RGB on there. And the last little old monitor down here, swing around. This one is actually a Commodore monitor, a 1701 from the very early 80s. And I've not worked on it yet, but it needs to get, see that, how the tube's loose. Tube works, everything looks good on it. There's no burn, and there's no, you know, none of the guns on the CRT are out, but it needs to be recapped, calibrated, and then needs to have that bezel fixed, where I can just get the tube stuck, because that's what's happened is the bezels cracked on the inside. And this little guy actually belongs to TRY from my life in gaming, and so I'm fixing that one for him. And that should be a fun project because I've not had any videos on a Commodore monitor. Now this is kind of the back stock parts area for now. There are a couple of leftover, well what's leftover of the parts monitors from the 2030s. Now I've got some more stuff down there, more eight inch stuff that's just really not working right and needs repairs. There's an extra tube that is good for a 14 inch PVM 600 line tube. And this is about the only flat screen monitor I have in here, this LCD Samsung that came out of an airport. And I've never done anything, any videos I don't think on it, but maybe something will come on that because it's kind of an interesting piece. The big guy here in the middle, this is one of the Sony D24s that I recently picked up, another amazing monitor. Now I was able to secure three of them, and one of them works perfectly, but the other two have some very severe issues. This is one with some issues, it will overload when it's running after a little bit, especially if you use, for some reason it won't overload on 240p, but if you use 480i or 480p or any resolution higher than 240p, the monitor will overload after a couple of minutes. So I'm assuming that that needs some cab replacement. And then the other two, as I swing around here, ones in the flight case, that's the one that works perfectly. And then this one has higher hours, it's like 68,000 hours, and there are some issues, I've been doing a lot of testing with it. Specifically right now I've got Xbox running through component in it, and I'll flip it on here for a minute and show you, it's probably not going to do the problem, but after a while the screen will start flashing, which makes me wonder if this is a tube problem, more than likely, but if I just click that remote on, eventually this will turn on. So look for a lot, obviously I'm going to rebuild pretty much every one of these D24s to see if we can make them at least two of them working, and again this one I'm just not too sure about. So anyway, that's just a quick shot of this D24, and I've got just Morrowind running here in the background, obviously. But this is just this amazing CRT for anything that's higher, higher range over 240p. I can't believe how good it looks for like regular Xbox, Xbox 360 and things like that. So definitely we will be doing a lot more content on that monitor. And then let's just shoot around here, this is just some consoles that I use a lot to test. It's a little bit of a mess in here right now, and then down there is a packed up, fully restored Sony PVM 2030 that was done a few months ago and just waiting to be picked up. Here we've got the Neo Geo MVS 4 slot cab that does work and works great. The only thing is it just needs some body work done to it. I've got all the kits for that, just haven't had the time really to dedicate to get that ripped apart and done. And then over here finally we've got the old Samsung CRT that I rebuilt and did an RGB mod. More 8-inch monitors. More 8-inch monitors. Those are actually the better ones that do RGB component everything. Parts. Here's an Olympus 203 that's just another scrap monitor. The tube's no good in it. A lot of the boards have problems, so it's kind of just a parts monitor. Same thing with this one under here unfortunately. The outside's in pretty good shape, but it's a 14L2 or 20L2 with a bad board in it. The tube's good and everything else. The main chassis is not good. And then this is just a rack of Xbox disc games mostly. And let's see here if there's anything else. There is one more interesting thing back there. That's actually a PVM cart for scopes, but it's perfect. It used to have a 14-inch on top of it. Now the 14-inch is down here, which is another monitor I forgot to mention. It's hidden back there. It's just a 14M2U that's going to be rebuilt coming up. And it can go on that cart. And then that 14-inch monitor also can go inside this travel box. This one does not have a monitor in it, but these boxes are great for when you need to move around some of these big heavy monitors sometimes. So the last, maybe two I can mention over here. Let's see. I've got some stuff down on the floor. And controller. This is another D-Series 14 that needs to be rebuilt. It won't turn on. Same thing with this one. It's an F-Series that needs to be recapped because it won't turn on. And those are both cap issues I know for sure. One of the things I was very happy to get off my list of things to do for this year was the restoration of the Sony PVM-20L5. I was able to show you how to take the thing apart and do pretty much every kind of preventative maintenance that you may need. It's like recapping and things. This PVM is highly adjustable. I was glad to be able to go through and navigate many of the service menus in this one because it is slightly different than the earlier models on the M-Series. It's more compatible or comparable to things like the D-Series on the Sony BVM line. But again, just a really high quality monitor with a lot of geometry controls so you can really hone in on a very perfect looking screen. Now I did explain to you earlier that this monitor has finally left my shop. This was back in February. I wanted to show you where it ultimately ended up and that's here at Matt's lab. And Matt is the founder and president of Insurrection Industries and he purchased the 20L5 from me again back in February and I was able to deliver it to him. We had the opportunity to put it side by side and test it against tries from my life in gaming. He had his 20L5 and he brought it down and we shot some footage of the monitor side by side just getting some testing done. So that's ultimately where it ended up and Matt and his team make some incredible products for the retro gaming community and you could be well assured that all his products are prototyped and tested on some of the best CRT monitors in the world. All right, so there you have it. The first two years of retro tech in the books and the last thing I really want to say is just a heartfelt thank you. Thank you very much for watching this channel, for thumbs-uping or even thumbs-downing videos, for being subscribed to the channel, for even sharing a video and especially anybody who's gone and done extra to support the channel. Whether that's being a member of Patreon or even people that have donated items and helped me find some of these different and rare CRTs, I sincerely appreciate it and you are a big part of why things have kind of blossomed in this little niche community of retro gamers as well as people from the art industry and other creative, influential people that are really into the wonderful format that is analog video and CRTs. So what I can promise you is that as long as I am able for this next year, we're going to continue to press on hard. I'm going to regularly be bringing you more new content on the monitors you saw in the shop right now as well as other CRTs that I have on my hunt list and just let me know if there's anything that you think would be special enough to make a retro tech episode about and I just may do it. Thanks again. If you do have any questions on how you can either help the channel out or if you have a question about a CRT, at this point pretty much all those things are funneled through Patreon so please check out the link below listed and guys I will see you real soon with some more retro content.