 Well hey there and welcome back to another season of Retro Tech. Today we're starting off with a very difficult repair on a Sony PVM CRT monitor. Now this has become known as the red light of death. Today, we've actually got a 20M4U high resolution Trinitron in my shop here. It has the red light of death and we're gonna see if we can't get this fixed. That's what we're gonna do is get started with that repair this season. Please if you don't mind do hit the like button and let's get rolling and check out the red light of death. All right, here we have today's repair subject the Sony PVM 20M4U and to get started I made sure that all the internal boards and everything inside the CRT were connected properly and there was no visible issues back here and that's the first thing I did because the client who owns this CRT did let me know that when they power it on it just has the red light and so before I even power it on and test that I opened it up and made sure everything in here looks good and everything looks normal. So what I need to do now is just power it on. I do have power going into it with this power cable right here and let's just see and verify that we have the red light of doom here. Okay, there you go. So I do feel some tube energy here and there's our red light right there. Let me turn out the There we go. Maybe you can see it a little bit better now. That's our red light and again nothing on the screen none of the buttons light up down here at all. We just have our power indicator. So we have some power to it. So there's some kind of issue here. So I'm going to start by inspecting our G board over here, which is the power supply on this PVM. Now I'm going to expand it out and we're going to run a couple of tests with my multimeter here, the voltmeter, and we will see if this power supply is outputting the proper voltage we need to run the PVM and that might be our issue is something in this power supply. But that's where we want to start because if we don't have good power the monitor is never going to work right. Now I went through and tested this power supply and I definitely have an issue. There is no 5 volt power coming from this 5 volt line right here on the main connection and look I'm just telling you this first off that this is a very dangerous test to run because you have to have live voltage coming in to the power supply and then it's being output right here. So you have to make sure you have a safe environment and you have to know what you're doing. Now I did make an entire video on how to do this test and test all these voltages a couple years ago. And I will link that right up here in the corner for a reference if anybody wants to go check that out. Basically you run through and you test the voltages with your voltmeter and I'm not getting any voltage off the 5 volt so that's an issue that if I don't get that 5 volt power I will not be able to get all the functionality on the CRT. So there's a 5 volt problem on this power supply. What can I do? Well, thankfully I have a replacement power supply for the M series PVM that will work with this CRT. Here we have our original power supply with the bad 5 volt rail and before I really invest a lot of time in repairing this I'm going to use a good power supply. This is completely refurbished. It has all new capacitors, has a full solder reflow done to the board, you can tell in there. So it's ready to go and it's tested and it outputs great stable voltage. So we're just going to pop this one in here and we're going to have to give it a test run. I'll turn that light out and let's just, oh, whoa. All right, great. So we do have our light come on here and oh, if we look over here we've got some light power light down here to the input board, which we did not have originally and look at that. We have the screen light up and that's really good. Look at that. We got no sync. That's normal. Nothing's being put into the CRT right now and check it out. Oh yes, we have all these. Oh yeah, check it out up there. Do you see that red line? We have a red line from the vertical blanking line. Let's go under scan. Maybe we can see it in under scan mode. I'm not sure. Let's get out of the menu. There it is. See our blanking lines here. They're supposed to be nice and tight up at the top of the screen, but they're leaning and that's a sign that we have more issues. Thankfully, this is something we can fix pretty easily with a capacitor kit, but that is on the main board. So I'm going to pull the board and we'll try to get this fixed, replace these capacitors that I'll show you, and we'll see if we can get rid of these red, green, and blue lines, which is another documented issue that can be related to the failure of the red light of doom on the PVM. The 20M4U is broken open and I've got the main board and neck board extracted out of here. So while I've got no boards back here, it gives me a chance to show you one of the reasons the 20M4U is so much more special than just even the M2 series, and it has to do with partially because of this right here, the deflection yoke. This is an extremely beefy deflection yoke that is the similar style to the ones that are inside BVMs. So you get a lot better performance from this yoke, and of course this tube is a 800 line tube, but this yoke is a higher performance yoke. It also has better controlling up here up top where you can actually stick a screwdriver in here and you can adjust these three different types of convergence adjustments on the screen if that is necessary, and you also can use this yoke on the 20 inch to rotate the screen without actually moving the yoke. It can do that through software on the PVM. And just to give you an idea, these are two other yokes that you would find in the 20M series. Now this one will be a little bit more desirable on that M series because you get two of these potentiometers to make those adjustments still to your convergence right there in the top of the yoke and this would have been the better yoke to get for your 20M2 series, but you also could get one like this which has just some wheels on top of it that are epoxied into place. You'll see right here and you actually have no adjustment potentiometers on this one, so you can't make really any fine tune adjustments to this yoke for convergence aside from using the rings and the other methods that will drive you crazy. So you know this is probably the worst of the three, better and then by far this would be the best deflection yoke. Now if we take a look at the boards from inside the back of the CRT, they are over here at the workstation and I've got a complete cap kit ready and our problem caps are going to be these in this area within the heat sink zone over here. These are all deflection capacitors and they've gone bad and need to be changed, all of them, every single one of these in here and a couple more over on this and anything kind of next to a heat sink and then we're going to change out these also. So I'm going to go ahead now remove all those bad capacitors, install the new kit and we'll see if that won't clear up our problems with the red, green and blue line dropping into our vision. Well hey, you're still here. Thanks for hanging out, listening to me talk about this CRT and I promise I'll get right back to the repair but before I do that I wanted to take an opportunity to ask you a question. What do you guys think of some kind of a class or an opportunity for us to maybe meet and get together and do like again a repair kind of a clinic, like something where you could bring your questions to me, you could work through things together, I would have maybe a CRT or something like that set up kind of like a new CRT retro tech class. What do you think? If you think that would be something that you'd be interested in please let me know by writing something in the comments below and again if that's something that you'd even consider traveling to or you know there would be costs involved so what do you think? Do you think you'd be interested in something like that and no matter what if you are interested in something like that I do have a live show and that's pretty much the whole premise of the live show where we're working on things and that's about as close to that experience as I can offer for free right now so if you want to check out the live show called The Bunker it is on the channel here and it's generally daytime middle of the day you can definitely check that out please do so and again if you have any ideas let me know in the comments what do you think about a live show a style class where you could be there and be a student along with the CRT master himself anyway let's get back to that m-series pvm repair all right the chassis has been rebuilt well not a hundred percent rebuilt but we did wind up replacing 28 capacitors in this deflection area and over in this area in the hot zones cleaned everything and it looks really really nice afterwards I also went through and reflowed the solder on all these transformers you know you have the big obvious flyback transformer here but also went through in these little inductors all those got reflowed the ICs and then like this is a transformer that's little there's another little transformer down in here so those are all done and serviced here's all the capacitors check it out these are all the old capacitors that's just the deflection kit everything's been pieced back together back in here again this has been serviced and off-camera I went ahead and serviced the neck board because I'm confident we're going to fix that so that's all been recapped and you can see it's got fresh solder on there and then everything's been cleaned and this is untested since all these repairs and I know it's probably going to work unless I screwed something up but what I'm going to do now is I'm going to power I've already got power going into this Super Nintendo or Super Famicom now we're going to power on the monitor and then we'll see if the screen image pulls up and if we have any other issues as it loads here what we're looking for again are the red green and blue lines here it comes everything's looking good and look at that wow I don't see anything nothing no lines let me let me change inputs so you can see where it says no sync like it did before and you always would see a red and a green line and then there's nothing so we've corrected that the capacitors that I told you about did fix that so what I need to do now is well I need to let this run a little while make sure everything in there gets warmed up and then I will make some adjustments and I'll show you what it looks like after I finish it up all right everybody here it is I've got it all put back together and it's working great not a single issue I've adjusted it and it is ready to go and if you want to know more about the Sony pvm 20m for you I did an amazing detailed video on this pvm and everything it does and all the features and goodies of this crt are in that video and I will link it right here and you could check that out at your convenience but this one is in great shape and we've solved this riddle of the red light on the tally light now the tally just flashes really briefly and it does not stay lit like it did before power comes on like you've seen a couple times here actually using component video this time and again if you want to know more about this amazing monitor check out that video but this one's done all right there you have it the pvm 20m for you is done and everything's good to go on that thing and I wanted to leave you with a couple notes here because this red light problem it could be more complicated than what I encountered today in this video so just getting good power into the monitor that might not be the only issue you could have more problems that are related to circuits inside the monitor in the main chassis and when that happens this repair becomes a lot becomes a lot more complex and sometimes it even becomes unrepairable and the abore just pretty much has to become a parts pvm at that point but the best approach is to always try to make sure that your power is good because you can rule out the power supply as being an issue if the power is good so again if you need more information on how to check out the power supply check out the m-series video I did a couple years ago it's going to have totally all that information and it's going to tell you everything you need to check out on your m-series monitor if you happen to get one or if you're considering getting one well that's going to finish up the first repair of the day the first repair of the season the new season here at retro tech thank you again for joining me please do make sure you subscribe because next episode we're going to be looking at the largest crt collection in the state of virginia and that's my own collection so hopefully you'll be subscribed up so you can check out that tour and i'll show you everything i've got here in this shop location plus the other shop locations i have around town you get to see that and more on the next episode and i'll see you all next time with some more retro content