 Hello, everybody, and welcome back today to Retro Tech. And we will be doing another restoration process repair for my friend Corey over at My Life in Gaming again. I'm sure most of you caught my video where I was able to restore and kind of repair his 20L5. Today we're going to work on the second monitor he brought in, which is a 14L5. But first off, I wanted to show you just in case you are not familiar with these guys' channel, which I'm sure most of you probably are. But just in case you're not, here is their channel. And I did want to give you a little bit of a challenge here. They have done some amazing documentaries. If you've not already seen these, these analog frontiers, part two is here. And part one was from about nine months ago down here. Anyway, if you want to take a challenge, oh, here it is. Right here. So if you want to take a challenge, go back and watch those videos. Or if you haven't seen them, go back and watch them. But if you have seen them, see if you can find the parts where I make my cameo appearance in these. It's really hard on number one, really easy on number two. So anyways, just wanted to show you that real quick. And before we get started, though, on this repair process, I wanted to walk you through a little bit on the PVM 20L5 and 14L5. This is a specific Sony brochure on this model. And this was a pretty futuristic model compared to the other PVMs of the time. Sony completely redesigned the shell of the monitor and everything inside it as well as added some support that this monitor could do that other PVMs in the past could not, which just is from 240p resolution support and 480i resolution support, which is only analog that the old PVM supported. Well, with this line, they added the digital support of 480p, 720p, and then 1080i. And there are even some other resolutions that this does support that if you're in a different region, that's important to note. This thing, this monitor is able to be used in different worldwide areas. It has a power supply that goes from 100 AC volts to 240. So it does have a multiple function like that. There are some things I do need to let you know. It does have an 800 line tube. And when you go into something like 720p, it's going to obviously go into a widescreen mode. And with this monitor, it's going to shrink that resolution down to 600 TV lines. So just be aware of that. If you move into those higher resolutions, the resolution of the tube or the sharpness of the tube is going to go down slightly. But at least it does support it. Now, if we talked about something on here in the early 2000s, this monitor would have come out. And the 14.05 we're looking at today would have cost about $2,025 as the MSRP in the early 2000s. And that's just for the monitor, not really for any accessories. Accessories like cards would have cost more. Now, if we go ahead and change that to today's money with inflation in the United States as of October of 2020, we're looking at about $3,090. So it's kind of an expensive monitor, but not the most expensive. Currently, the lowest price on eBay has one for about $1,500. I've seen them sell between $700 to $1,000 right now, as, again, we're talking about in October of 2020. So it's definitely one of the higher priced 14-inch monitors on the market. So next, I want to show you a little bit about today's prepare, which we're going to be swapping the tube on this one. I'll show you a little bit about the problems with this tube on the 14.05. But first, I want to go through a little bit of the process with you, because some of these, I've done the video on the 20.05. I've shown you how to do this. And rather than show you how to do the process again, I figured I would link to that video right here, in case you want to watch the first couple of minutes and see how you remove the shell and the first board. But if you don't, I can just go over it with you real quickly in this service manual. And so I'm at page 8 of disassembly. So what we're going to do here is this first step of removing the shell, which is just removing those six screws and then the screws on the back and then removing it back. And then we're going to get in, and we're also going to have to remove our bezel assembly a little bit. And finally, we're going to have to go in here. And one of the things we are going to start off with being removing is our D board. There is a nice block diagram and many block diagrams that tell you exactly how to take a lot of these points apart on this monitor, which is very helpful. And so let's go ahead now without any further ado and jump into our footage for our repair. Well, here are the monitors. I want to show you first how I had them set up and go through some test footage and videos so I can show you the exact condition of the PVM and the tubes. The PVM overall was in really tip top shape cosmetically from the outside. The problem here is that this tube and 14 inch monitor must have been used in its prior commercial life as a direct monitor that was most likely on constantly. And it's really going to be hard to notice here what I'm talking about on the screen burn until I get to some specific pictures that I'm going to show you. You can tell, though, that the geometry is pretty good on here. So we're not as concerned about geometry problems. We're more concerned with this, which is our screen burn. So just try to look in here. I'm trying to point this out as we roll through this footage. We're going to look for, I'll try to pause it right on the point here where I can see it best on my LCD screen, maybe right there. So let's look right here. You see where it says DESK? And I think it says TOP. And then there's some other lettering in here. And it's there. There's no way to get rid of it. It's burned into the actual tube screen. So that was the big problem with this one is just that screen tube burn that was against the entire top section. And there might have even been a little bit of burn in the bottom corner. But we can fix that by swapping this tube out. So I told you earlier about how I wanted to show you some of the I wanted to get rid of some of that process in this video by removing that shell. That's already been done. And so has that D board that has been removed. Those are very simple to do. It's literally just the screws pulling it out. And the same thing with the D board. There's an entire bracket holding it in place. You just simply remove that bracket and those connection points. And then you're able to access this area of the back of the PVM. Now we're going to try to take this apart without really taking everything on the monitor apart. I want to keep as much of this together as possible to limit the amount of time I have to take trying to reassemble on the back end. So the way I'm going to start this is obviously with the D board gone. Next I'm going to move on to the neck board. There are some connections on there that you'll need to disconnect in order to get the neck board to get a little bit loose. There's also a ring on that neck board that connects it to a piece of plastic. Now 95 out of 100 times, that plastic will just crack and break. Don't worry about it. It's not necessary for the next tube. It's just a little bit of a spacer to hold that neck board into place, but it normally gets held into place. So what you see me do right now is the discharge process. And this is the way that the Sony manual actually says to discharge, which is not actually to use the discharge tool directly on the tube. It's to pull the anode cap out and then discharge that against the frame or the discharge tool. And I know that seems a little crazy, but that's the way they recommend it so you don't scrape the back of your tube with a screwdriver. So the next part here is our removal of our bezel, which is just four screws holding that into place. The big part you want to make sure you're aware of is your button, your power button right here, on-off button. Now that is mechanically on a switch, and it's in a couple pieces. So sometimes the forward part of the button will fall out. It's not a problem. You can go back, snap it back into place, but it is loose and it does fall out. There are also a few connection cables that will need to be removed, but I'm not going to remove all of them because I'm going to keep this side here still intact. That way, I'm limiting, I don't want to remove the whole bezel and then put it all back on. Now I just want to be able to access this tube as easily as possible, removing the bezel and keeping it out there all the way like that is a way for me to easily get back to it. Now this is just held in by four bolts, so I'm just going to remove those bolts and we're going to get this tube out because again, nobody wants to have those nasty letters on their tube and they're trying to play a game, especially not when you're on a white screen that's really distracting to have screen burn on a bright colored screen or uniform colored screen. So there we go. We've got it fully loosened. You'll notice that I did not remove that yoke. That yoke is going to stay on there for now and I'll tell you why here in a second. Let's go through real quickly and I want to show you the donor monitor that we're taking the tube out of. This right here is the Sony A14 F5U that had no controller boards in it except for the SDI card and I've got a few of these monitors. I literally bought this straight for the parts, this monitor. So I'm taking that tube from this one. It had 6,500 hours of use on it, beautiful tube and this is what the frame looks like after I've taken that tube out. Kind of the same process as it was with the other one but there we have it. It's our new tube. It's compatible. It's wonderful. So is the yoke. That's the best part about this whole job is that the yoke is compatible. So this tube right here is going to be compatible with just about any BVM. You know, with any of the BVMs if you have a problem with it, you could swap it between those BVMs that are 14 inches as well as this 14L5 because they're all 800 line tubes and they also include the nice little anti-scratch resistant layer on there. So that's a nice wonderful thing that only those higher end tubes will have. But again, I get to just switch this and the yoke is completely compatible on here. So that's another good reason to buy if you can an A series with low hours for relatively low price and you can get it for the parts. Again, the tube is a perfectly great tube and the fact that they use the same yoke is really saving a lot of time because if I bought a new tube, it would cost more and then I'd have to go in and reset the yoke, reset the convergence, reset everything on it without, you know, that would take a lot longer than just a simple swap of the tube with the yoke still on there, especially since it's compatible. So this, we're just going back and doing the reverse of what you saw me do a few minutes ago, which is to replace everything back that we just took out so we can test this tube. And you wanna fully reassemble your bezel. Just showed you there how to do it. It is, it can be kind of frustrating and difficult to line up, but take your time, make sure you screw it back in and then you just got a couple of connections to make on the side there and you're ready to hook everything back up. We'll start back with the neck board. We'll remake all our connections and then we're gonna put the yoke or the anode cap back into the back of the tube, replace the deflection board you saw me, briefly pull it up, but that's where it goes right here. It's really simple. I'm telling you, it's just one screw, usually maybe two on this bracket and the whole bracket lifts up and pulls out and you just wanna make sure you've disconnected all these cables on here. So that way I didn't have to sit there and bore you with showing you that process again, but that's all you need to do is just reset that. Let's see if we can get a test screen pulled up. Looks like it's working fine. We've got our blue, white, green screen a little bit there and here we have our first test of a console on it. Now I do need to do a little bit of calibration adjustment, which I will go through here briefly with you, okay? So you want to, this will be calibrated the same way you're gonna calibrate any of these L5s and even the L2 should be pretty similar, even though it has a different button pattern, the menus will be similar. So we're gonna get into that deflection block by hitting the gauze and pulling the menu up and hitting the gauze and menu at the same time and to pull it up and again, once you get into that, you just wanna go to deflection block on your submenu and you can make all the necessary adjustments for horizontal, vertical centerness, linearity, pin cushion settings and et cetera. So this tube, I mean with the 6,000 hour tube, that's just a really low amount of hours. It looked beautiful. The new, it looked amazing. It looked even better and more sharp than I could have imagined just by the tube swap. So we got a tube balanced, Corey loved it. He told me that he was actually considering making this the main monitor in his setup because it looked so much better than the previous or just the 2005, looks great, but not as great as when you compact that screen size down a little bit. Just looks a whole lot sharper. So I took the old tube that you saw with the screen burn and I actually installed it back into the A series just so I could use this monitor and still have it be testable or if I need it for some other reason, it's ready to go and I can use it still, again, as like a tester for other boards, but I'm not concerned with the fact that it has a screen, a tube of screen burn in it really. It's just a pretty much a parts unit anyway. And this A series, they're great monitors, but they're just not really, right now, they're not worth much more than parts considering how rare the analog boards are. I mean, not only the 68X, the 61D that has composite and S video support is really getting difficult to get as well. So that's it for today's repair. Again, just a tube swap and if you have a bad tube, look for these A series monitors with low hours because you can generally get them for a lot less than you can even a working analog only BVM so that tube can be taken out of here and it can go in even an analog only BVM like an F or a G series. And again, that yoke is most likely 100% compatible. Just check it out though to make sure ahead of time and before you plug it in that it is in case, I mean, I obviously showed you here that the 14L5 and the A series and then I know the D series that those are all compatible. But if you go back further into analog only monitors just double check before you plug in the yoke. It probably won't do anything wrong to the tube but there's always a chance. Anyway, thanks again for watching today guys. If you're new to the channel, please make sure you subscribe and hit the like button for me. And if you have any questions or comments please leave them below and I'll see you guys next time with some more retro content.