 Hey everybody today, I have a very special CRT in my repair shop, and it's definitely one of the rarest I've ever seen. This is the Bang & Olufsen MX5000 and I went through and did pretty much a complete restoration on this television set but this video you're about to watch is quite lengthy. So to try and help out I do have everything separated below into chapters that way if you want to skip around and see certain things you can do that. And also if you do enjoy this video, please do me a favor and hit the like button so that this can expand the reach and help out with the algorithm. And without any more introduction, let's check out the Bang & Olufsen MX5000 television. All right, we're gonna take a quick look here at this amazing rare CRT it is in my shop this week. And this is the B & O or Bang & Olufsen CRT this particular one is the it says MX5000. It is an extremely rare television as I said especially here in the United States. Now if you're in Europe you'll find these or Japan you may find some of these pretty pretty easily but over here in the United States there's not really a lot of these. And supposedly this particular branded or version of this television is NTSC. I just wanted you to see the front. Here's a first look. It definitely has this glass coating over what is a shadow mask tube under there. So you could tell it's curved on all edges, but it has this amazing piece of glass over the top of that. Just an incredibly beautiful sleek design here. I want to give you a look at the back of this television and first let's take a look at this label. The label says we have 1989 for a manufacturer date and not a whole lot more of not a whole lot of other information. A lot of inputs over here for RF and then down here we have S-Video some audio-video inputs for composite and then there's some power connections to input speakers. And this one has a stand that goes with it, but the stand is not here. There's also these are just external devices that you could easily connect with this set like a VCR and things. But this particular one supposedly has this RGB input over this SCART input. I've not tested this so we're going to see what happens when I plug it up to this Super Nintendo. Let's look here at our remote. Now this remote is one of the heaviest remotes I've ever felt. Really heavy. What do you think Cole? Cole's still trying to figure it all out. Anyway, heavy-duty remote. We do have power going to this so I'm going to flip around put this light behind the set Let's just see if I can get this to actually power on. Oh, I heard it. It's starting to power on here. There we go. Okay So there's a TV running just in RF mode, I guess. Let's see if we could change it over to an input. Well, see we're getting an image. We're not syncing though. Interesting. I was able to get a signal into this set. Believe it or not, full color proving that it is NTSC. I don't know how to get rid of that set TV clock. We're going to take a look at the manuals here and see if we find anything. But the only way I could get this to work is going basically to RF and I'm in RF mode. It looks really good for RF, but there's no way you can make any adjustments on a set based on RF. So hopefully we can figure out a way to get better a better signal into it. Let's just take a look at something that will look good. Again, I don't know how if I can clear that. We are getting a picture though. Set clock is so annoying. It's a very, I mean, it's not an easy remote. It doesn't really tell you anything. It's just dumb. Let's set clock. Wonderful. Let's do it. And you see I don't even know how to go down. There's not like a down arrow on this that works. You press down. It doesn't do anything. Oh, you press over. Of course. Why not? Let's press over. And then what? You have to press play. Who cares? Okay. Now if I get out of this, I press a menu. We'll even get out. There we go. We got rid of the clock. We just let it sit there. I think it's 2 a.m. on 2020. Gosh, this thing's awesome. Thankfully I had to work this and get RGB going. I bet it looks awesome. All right. This B&O needs to be serviced and that's going to start by removing the back. So I've got it ready here. I'm going to take you around the backside and we're going to show you how to get it open. It's pretty simple from the manual. It says there's four screws, one practically in each corner. And the fun thing about these screws is their Phillips head. But they don't actually pull all the way out. The screws don't. So they stay with the back of the shell, I believe. Just seems like a nice little touch from B&O. So again, this is the back of this beautiful CRT. It should slip right off. I'll pull it off and show you what it looks like underneath there. And we'll get off this back shell here and try to see if we can service the inside of this set. All right. The back came right off. And first things you'll notice is our extra large tube back here. And it's not very deep. It's actually quite short and stumpy for a 26 inch, 28 inch tube. Look at this. It's made by Hitachi. And our model number is a66abu39x. And then we have our deflection yoke right here. Our neck board, which will be one of the boards I'll be pulling and servicing for a cap kit and definitely fresh solder. We'll get some fresh solder on this board. And then we will, oh yeah, look at that. So you get some corrosion up here already on this board. Definitely something we should have, you know, be considering. Look at that. Corrosion building up on this board. Definitely need some fresh solder on there. And below that is a resistor board pretty much. There's a couple caps in there. Probably needs to be recapped. Same thing with this input card right here. And wow, basically all this stuff's going to need to come out. We go to RF tuner right here and the main board down in there. That's the one too that needs to be addressed. There's boards back here. And more and more boards. Some more boards over here with some large filter capacitors on them. So this is going to be a pretty lengthy job. We'll have to pull this entire chassis out and service the board. So that's what I'm going to try to start doing is get ready, set up for that. Something else that's interesting. Check out these tubes coming out of the speakers back here against the back of the tube with some nice cushion. That's an interesting design for the sound and subwoofers. And then our flyback cable. Check it out. The anode actually goes up around the tube up here and comes right back here instead of the normal way where it would just be hanging out here and going into the tube. So let's see what I can do to get some of these boards out. And one of our first steps is going to be to remove this tuner. So I need to disconnect this RF cable right here. And then there's a quick disconnect. This RF cable and then we can remove this block and get it out of the way. And it was held in with two screws. So these boards all slide out in one piece. You just have to make sure that you slide out like this board on the side, this transformer. And then all this is coming I'm going to disconnect the cables down here for the degausing coil. And then I've disconnected the yoke deflection yoke cable right here. And then let's see this cable was actually tucked around under behind the speaker tube and connected right down in there. So I'll reconnect that later. But I have to make sure I disconnect all these over here that are going into here. And then it looks like there's one more. Yep, that's coming up and connected here. So I need to disconnect this cable, all these, because those connect around to the front side and then into all this. And I really keep it all together and pull it out at once. So I'm going to do that. We'll also keep the neck board with it, pull it off. The only thing we will need to do is we'll set up and discharge this tube in a second. And I've almost got this guy completely pulled. You can tell I've got the neck board here of it. There's one set of cables that just does not want to come out without me disconnecting them all. There's three connections down here. One connection up here. And this is bundled together. And it loops around through here. And I don't want to just snip all these zip ties, but I'm going to snip some of them so I can get that cluster of cables out. Because one of them goes into the front of the CRT in there, this red. And so we're going to get this one out of the way, because everything else is out of the way. Actually, this needs to be disconnected. That's the degausing cable. Well, the chassis is ready to completely remove now. I did have to remove a couple of these zip ties just to get that one cable loose. And I wound up removing the anode cap here. You could see it's just two pieces. I was able to pinch the back of this cup together and just pull it out like that. So I've not technically discharged the tube. Of course that I could just ground that against any old metal. And it's grounded. I believe that there has to be a resistor in this thing. But I've not technically, whoop, no, I'm just kidding. I'm not going to stick my finger in it. There still could be a charge there. I don't know. I'm not messing with that area right now. So I'm just going to leave it. I'm going to get this board, actually all these boards out, and take them to the shop. And here's one last look at this tube area before I really get in here and clean it. And it's just this very large tube. You'll also notice again how narrow the tube neck is here. That's one of the more narrow designs for the 1980s. And then down in here is where our boards sit into place. And obviously this all needs to be cleaned out. The only board left there is the manual power button board over there in the front of the television. And here are all the circuit boards from inside the television set. This right here is our main board with our flyback transformer right there. And we've also got our geometry and deflection is taking place on this board. And it also appears parts of the power supply is on this board and then connected over here to this board back here. So you have that two board combo, which makes up, you know, a majority of the things there. Here's some standby power board broken out here with this massive transformer that is inside the set. That is a massive transformer that's comparable to more like an arcade machine. And then under here, now this has already been broken out somewhat, but this board normally has 100 cables going into it. And it goes and slips under this board in that compartment right there. And this is mostly the tuning from the RF tuning and other controls. I'm imagining we're getting in our picture control chips over here in our jungle chip probably. So this board is going under there. But this has a ton of capacitors on it. And that's just a couple of the boards because if we keep going, we have this board that's in there. We have our neck board right here. And then we have this cluster of boards, which is like a daughter neck board up here also input, or I'm sorry, attached to the input board right here. And then there's a third board behind all of that that has more things on it. And then finally, it all climaxes with this battery down here, which I'm going to have to do something about because this super lithium Maxwell battery, this can explode or leak, and then cause massive amounts of damage to the boards that sit under it. Because this sits right in this position normally, right here. And all that battery acid would then leak down to this board, which is the tuner and control board underneath sitting in there. So that would happen where that would battery will eventually leak out behind there onto this board and cause all kinds of problems. All right, everybody's check this out. I did a live stream not too long ago where I highlighted these the manuals for the B&O MX5000 CRT. So if you want to see more about that, there will be links to that stream in the description. I also did a stream where I went through all the board servicing where I looked at pictures of every board that was serviced. I go through and talk about how each was serviced and what I found servicing each of those boards because there's a lot of bad capacitors and just old parts inside this TV set. So if you're interested in either of those two expanded topics on this B&O, please check out the links in the description. Now let's get back to the restoration. Now here's the bundle of all our circuit boards that have now been serviced. I went ahead and reconnected everything based on the photographs I took before I serviced, but I also was able to reference this amazing B&O manual that had the wiring diagram right here so I could verify everything that was plugged in correctly and there are so many plugs on this television. It's pretty vital to make sure that everything is plugged in in the right spot. Now 95% of these cables are labeled, but there are a few that are not or the labeling has worn off. But as you can see everything's been finished. We've got all the boards have differing level of service done, but most of them have some level of capacitor replacement and others have been completely recapped like our main board and our neck board and our power boards. And also we've had to had to reflow solder on a lot of boards. So just a lot of normal servicing done to this TV, but now it's time to put this in the back of the tube and the back of the TV and test it out and hopefully everything will be all right. I do still have to connect my tuner up there and a couple other cables, but for most part everything here is done. I consulted the wiring diagram fully and reassembled the TV. I got all the boards connected in here and they're all properly checked out and everything. You just see how much better things look in here. It's all been cleaned out and everything's kind of ready for a good test run. And you just got to again make sure everything's connected in here properly. I've gone through and done all that and also one thing that I didn't mention before, but there's a lot of ground loops on this TV. And so you have to make sure that your ground loops are solid, especially on an older set like this just to make sure it's going to function properly. So everything went well and our servicing of the boards because the CRT has now been running for about an hour. Looks really good. Especially considering I'm still only able to figure out how to use composite video back here. And that's what I'm inputting through. I've been trying to use the decoder, the video inputs, and I can't get anything to switch over. The remote is just insane and driving me crazy. But everything else is working good. All right. So look this TV set after it was finished up and ran through some tests. I started to run some strange issues. First off, the picture would just randomly kind of not turn on. Basically, I do a power cycle and the image would kind of disappear. And then I could still tell the tube was turning on and honestly 90% of the CRT was functioning properly. But it did have an issue there where I was not getting an image consistently. After that happened, I spent some time again reviewing all the work I had done. And I actually went in and recapped the input board and reflowed sonar init completely. And again, if you want to hear more about all the interior work done on these boards, check out the live stream where I go through the boards individually and talk about all this. And I do talk a little bit more about this issue that I ran into. But ultimately, I was able to figure it out by just turning up the screen voltage on the back of the flyback on the set. And what had happened is after it had been restored and started running, it actually caused the G2 voltage to seem to want to drop down to a point where you weren't actually getting a visual picture on the tube, even though everything else was functioning as it should. Another issue with this television is the remote control. If you don't find a remote control for this set, it's very difficult to navigate through. And a lot of things you won't even be able to change. I'm sure you could probably use a universal remote, but there's a lot of weird things that B&O did with this TV set. And the remote was definitely one of those oddball things. And another thing is you can tell from this video there were a total of eight circuit boards inside this CRT. All those circuit boards at this point needed to be serviced. This television was produced in 1989, and really the reason it never made it big in the United States marketplace had a lot to do with durability and obviously the complexity of this television. And as parts would break down, it would cause failure on these sets. Not a lot of places could properly work on them. And ultimately the B&O television set failed in the United States marketplace. But if you do find one of these, they are relic. They're very rare. You may find somebody that's still interested in trying to get them restored, but they are a lot of work. However, I can't deny they look amazing. The look of them is really cool and really clean, especially the architectural design. I didn't even mention this, but there actually is a kickstand at the front of this television where you can kick the CRT up a little bit and back. And so that's a really cool design feature. Just a lot of really cool look aesthetics to this television. But it is going to be a lot of maintenance on a set like this. And you're going to need to maintain all your peripherals that you're using with it that are B&O materials too, to get the full proper experience. But I must admit it's a pretty damn cool experience, right? If you have it working. At the end of the day, I was able to get this one working. I did not get a lot of footage afterwards because I had to spend so much time on this project. I was already over budget and over time. And I had already agreed with the client to basically take all that time on myself and cover the costs to that extra time. So I really wasn't able to get a lot of extra footage. I did get a little bit of footage of RGB with some SNES on there that eventually did function out. And so I'll show you a little bit of that footage here. But otherwise, the restoration went fine. This CRT is going back to its owner. And I'm not really sure if I'll ever do another B&O MX5000 or MX Anything restoration. I really don't know. This was a completely new experience for me. It was definitely challenging. And I think it would be a super expensive restoration for me to do again. It's just so much work in there and so many, so many more things to consider in a job like this, as opposed to just a normal set that you might find that you can get, you know, an equal picture quality from a normal set that is 27 inches, even an RCA or something if you RGB mod the thing. So anyway, that's my final thoughts on the B&O MX5000. I appreciate all you for watching all this video. If you enjoyed it, please again, do me that favor of hitting the like button. If you need more help or have any interest of joining our CRT community and even maybe getting some repair advice or hey, even a restoration of your own, do check out my Patreon page. That is also linked in the description below. And guys, I'll see you all next time with some more retro content.