 Hey everybody, welcome back today to RetroTech. I have a familiar PVM and that's a Sony PVM14 M2 that we'll be covering in today's video. Now this video is going to go and cover all the way from when you may get this PVM for the first time. Let's say you buy it or you come into a chance to maybe get one and you want to take a look at the PVM ahead of time or maybe you got a great deal on one and you wanted to see what it might need for refurbishment, if anything. Well today's video is going to be really good for that. It's a long video and I've broken it down into segments. So if you want to come back or if there's something in particular you are looking for, definitely check the description of the video because I have time marked each specific chapter because I'm going to go through everything in this video today. We're going to start with kind of the first initial unboxing a little bit of the monitor. Now I'm not going to actually show you an unboxing portion in this video. What I will do is in the introduction here, I'll show you some pictures while I'm talking because this was one of the worst packed jobs that I've seen probably in the last six months where a monitor has not been destroyed. The box was all disintegrated up. There was very little actual bubble packaging and the seller actually used a lot of just really cheap paper to wrap the PVM around and around and around and somehow it survived that trip even though the box pretty much blew up into three or four pieces right after I moved it off my porch inside and so once I got it out of the box, I went through and I did some initial checks on it. You'll see those. You'll see what it looks like before I do any kind of adjustments. You know, I did some convergence checks on it so you can see what it looks like through a professional convergence tool that I used on here to check that out. I've also gone through and I've done some recommended upgrades and maintenance from Sony where they have had actually a fault designed in this PVM unintentionally, but there is a fault in there with the red, green and blue line and the vertical blanking and you'll see more of that in the video to come. And then also we're going to get and clean it thoroughly, calibrate it for geometry, do one final screen check, and then I've actually got some physical body work that I'm going to be doing on the shell too. So just a full packed video. So if you really enjoy PVMs, you could stare out and just watch the restoration or if you're thinking about getting a PVM, this might be a good video for you. Just note that this model is one of the more common PVMs there are and most of the PVMs that you find, a good majority of them, 75% of them will be nearly the same kind of build out as today's 14M2 and also just because something is a 20 inch monitor, it's just pretty much a little bit larger size scaled version of the 14 inch monitor. All the parts internally are nearly the same and it's always the same process. So if you have a slightly different monitor than the PVM 14M2, you still may be able to be, or you still might be able to learn something that may be valuable to you when keeping your PVM up to date and servicing it routinely. So without any more introduction today, let's go ahead now and switch over. We're going to look at the 14M2U and today's repair video. All right, here we've got the Sony PVM unpacked and powered on. I've let it warm up a little bit. So obviously it arrived fine, even though the packing was really subpar in my opinion. And just to show you some of the outside exterior before we really get into the internal hardware servicing, you want to take a quick look at some of the buttons on the configuration down here and besides just your power on button and a lot of your knobs that you have on your M2 model, which are quick adjustments. You can use a lot of these adjustments. Just remember that some of them are not used in RGB mode, but in most other video input modes, they will be usable. Now if I move on to this other area of the button board down here, this is an important area where you will make other adjustments or change input settings to whichever video input you need. And then you can do combination things or change immediate settings like under scan, 16 by 9 mode on the screen. There's also a degauss button that when you press it, it's supposed to help degauss the tube in case any magnetism has affected your picture quality. And then you've got a mesh area over here, which has your mono speaker housed behind it. So this actual monitor itself is in pretty good shape. There is a little bit of minor scuffing and scratching up here to the top area of the bezel and thankfully all the parts as far as buttons and the U-bolts did not get damaged at all in the shipping and packing process. Now there is something on the side here that was in the listing. If we look at the side of the PVM, we have a small ding or dent on the grate where something has hit the side of the shell. Now it's not impacted the PVM's performance in any way, but I told the owner that I would just take a hammer and kind of flatten that out. So we'll do that on this shell. We'll also clean the entire shell off because there is some grime and what appears to be leftover adhesive, some minor scratching along it. And then if we look at this side, it actually looks rather clean, no dings or anything, just needs a little bit of cleaning. And then the backside has that has quite a few scuffs that are going to be more visible and will not be really able to get rid of them, but we will clean it still and then we'll come back and reassemble all this after we do our full servicing, but that's just a look at the outside of the shell. So we're going to look at the 240p test suite now and see if we can pull up some geometry settings that we could see what we're starting with on a screen. What I'm initially going to do here is pull up test patterns so we can see our starting point on this monitor. I'll start with our color bars and you can turn your brightness up. And what you're really trying to see is if your tube does produce this three line gray pattern in here, it should on a 600 line tube. Sometimes if you have a lower line tube or if your tubes bloomed out or bleeding out or old and worn out when you pull this up, you'll get a lot of distortion on your screen. So that's why you want to pull this up and you can check to see that that is on there. And then the way you're supposed to calibrate this is to have it where that is just barely visible on the screen at all. Barely visible, kind of like that on your screen where you barely see those three blocks, rectangles within the square The next pattern we're going to look at is our grid for our geometry. The first one available 256 by 224. And from initial looks, we're not in bad shape, but what we need to do is decrease or get our vertical centerness down some. And then our pen cushion settings are actually pretty good, but we also need to do a horizontal adjustment. I'm doing a visible check here for linearity, but not just linearity. Also convergence and the linearity pattern is really good about showing any convergence problems that you may have in each corner because you'll see color separation where your whites might show red, blue, generally speaking, you'll see it on one side or the other. Let's do a proper check of the convergence real quick. And I've got this Klein convergence tool. Now, maybe there's some kind of lens you can use on your phone to do this. But what I've got is an actual old tool made by Klein that we'll go in here and actually check the convergence if you just softly place it against the screen. And if we actually look inside here, and so if you try to focus on the beam, which is inside the lens that you're looking into, you can see where the blue it's got three lenses in there. And it just separates the white out into only allowing the blue on the right side, the green in the center. And then ultimately the red on the right, which I'm not able to pick up. There's the red on the right. And what you're looking for is beam uniformity. So you want to make sure that vertically, each one of those colors is pretty uniform in that way. You've got nice convergence for all three colors into a single beam for white and it really can sharpen up your picture, especially in the corners. One of the other good things to check out is a scroll test. So there is a regular scroll test that is quite popular. That is the Sonic background. And you could just use that to make sure that as your screen displays a good 240p image and it goes across the screen that you don't have any tearing or warping due to a linearity problem, which again, I have not seen any kind of linearity problem really on this tube. So that's again, really good sign that it's probably low hours. So now that we've got a good overview of what's going on mechanically with this, the rest of the checks are going to require me to remove the shell, but that's OK because I need to clean it up. And there are some components that I'm going to pull from the circuit board inside here that are recommended by Sony. And it's very important to maybe either check these two components or just go ahead and be prepared to replace them. We're quite cheap, so we're going to go ahead now, but we've got to, again, get the shell off to move any further in this check. Now that the screws are removed, we can slide the shell back. Get out of the way. This is the first inspection back here. So I want you to just take a look at the footage here of the inside of the monitor. You'll be able to see a lot of just dust built up on some components and over time that does happen. And what that can do is it can stack up on some of these components that are actually generating heat and then that dust will act as an insulation on top of these components. And so it traps the heat internally in the component. And then that causes the temperature to go up and ultimately can cause things like electrolytic capacitors to fail or wear out quicker than they should. Now, this is not a lot of dust, but it's a good example of one that has never been probably serviced or looked at inside before. Before I get into the full disassembly of this, I want to show you another test I'd like to perform on the power supply, which is over here on the other side. Again, here's the power supply. The first thing I'm going to do is remove the two screws. So let's lift up a little bit and go ahead and lean this power supply over and to relieve some pressure. You're doing that and releasing these cable holds to give a little bit more space here. Same thing over here and then all along this back shielding. And then I'm going to simply disconnect the top portion up here. This plug cable from its connector. All right, so let's have a little discussion here about the power supply. This power supply works like this. You feed your AC current into the back of the PVM where you install your standard power cable right here next to your input board. And that power then goes directly into this power supply. And then the power supply converts that into the usable power for the PVM. Now, what's going on up here where we're leaving it connected. We're leaving just the degausing cable and the actual power switch, which this feeds over straight into the power switch on the front of the PVM so that when we press that power button, it tells the power supply to turn on. Now, normally how this functions is that power is generated and then properly the current is tuned. And then it sent out this connection where it goes into the main board and then it's sent around into all the other processes it goes through to give you a picture on the screen. I'll show you the connector here, but you're looking at from the far right hand side over here next to this little electrolytic capacitor. You've got a isolated pin that's for five volts. Next to that, you've got a 15 volt negative pin. And then we've got a ground pin right here, kind of in the center. Next to that is 115 volts, another ground pin, and then a positive or just regular 15 volt. 15 volts, obviously our higher voltage and then the five voltage is our lower voltage, but that's going to be DC current. So what we can do is we can get a multimeter and test the DC voltage as we turn the power supply on by plugging it in. And so let's go ahead and do that real quick and do this correctly. First off, we'll check the very first rail. And that is five volts should be DC. So we're going to go red to that pin. And then I like to use this ground right here. And if you look at my meter, it says right at 5.00 volts DC current. So that's perfect. OK, let's check our positive 15 volts. And that's good. That's right at 15 and a half. That's definitely within tolerance. So I've gone ahead and powered it back off. And before I go and do any more testing, I'm just going to reconnect. Again, it is turned off. I'm going to reconnect this to the main monitor. And we'll see. Make sure that screen still functions properly after our testing. Let's power it. Then we still got our screen power up. And we'll just check our menus real quick. There are menus there. Everything's fine. So now we're going to jump into the servicing of the rest of the monitor, which means we'll tear it apart and service the main board. The last thing I need to do before I remove is to discharge the tube. Now, please note that this can be a dangerous process. Now, on this Sony PBM, there's actually fail safes involved. So it's supposed to dissipate all the current even before you discharge it. But that doesn't always work. It doesn't always happen. The way I'm discharging it right now is according to the Sony manual. And the reason they ask you to do it like this without the tool to start with is to prevent damage to your anode cap and your anode cap here. And the point where your tube is on the back of your seat will scratch it with your probe or whatever tool you're going to use to discharge. Now, it's not discharged yet. So what we're going to do is we're going to tap those two prongs under this anode cap against the frame. Make sure you're not touching the metal frame. And if you hear a zap or anything, that means you're discharged. If you hear nothing, that means it's already been discharged, most likely. And the current was out before you even took it apart. So that's just how Sony says to discharge it. And then if you're concerned, you can come in with your discharge tool and discharge that point against your frame also and just make a current path and honestly, if you've got a screwdriver that you could do it with, you could even do it like that and bridge those two points. We're not really doing anything to the back of the anode here, except cleaning around it, so we don't need to worry about that as much. But that's how Sony asks the technicians to discharge a tube. Now we can take a closer look at this board. And also with it completely torn apart like this, it would be easier to clean and get a lot of that build up dust, especially off this area. And then off the boards individually. So here are the three secondary boards that are inside the monitor. First off down here, we have our seaboard, which is our neck board. And the most important thing we're going to do here is pretty much just clean this, just a little bit of dusting. And what you can check on here is for cold solder joints. It doesn't always happen, but it is possible. Most common areas that might develop those are going to be around these little regulators here. And the only reason I mention that is because the temperature can get higher in this area than other areas on this board. And then you can always check around your actual connection points. You're going into your tube. But for the most part, this board looks very clean and definitely no signs of any kind of damage or even real signs of overheating. Sometimes when you get these boards out, you'll see a lot of discoloration on some areas, like I said, especially around these heat sinks and then these larger resistors right here. They'll generate so much heat that you'll get burns on the circuit board. So just note that that does typically happen. So that's a good sign that there aren't a huge amount of hours in or on this monitor and it just needs to be a little bit clean. The next board we'll look at real quickly is our input board, which just pops out. And this is pretty standard stuff for all the M2 series. This board really does never or doesn't really ever have any troubles in it. And I've never had to service this particular board for any reason. There's not a lot of heat generated at all on this board. And so, thankfully, it's a pretty easy one to just clean and move on from. And then this is the power supply. Now there is shielding in place. So we'll need to remove the shielding to accurately look inside here and then clean it properly. But it's pretty much the same power supply for this M series. It'll be the same for the M2 or the M4. And it could also be one of the medical units. So, for example, the MDUs or even the Olympus PVMs all use the same power supply for the most part. And sometimes there are slight variations of the build out on the power supply. However, at the end of the day, it's still designed to put out that specific voltage out of this output. So if it's compatible and it's outputting the proper voltage, even if the build out is slightly different on yours than this one, it's still probably safe to use on your monitor. Now, I've discussed a lot with Savon Pat about the capacitors in here. And he tells me that this power supply was so well designed that the capacitors do not tend to fail. And I've not had many where they have actually failed. I don't know on this specific monitor. But if you don't have a power, you know, you can do the test we did. And if you have some kind of power issue, you can either come back and check the caps on each line. You know, that'll be in the service manual. Or what more often than not happens that Pat told me is any of these ICs on this board can short out and go bad. And you can see on this board, there's just loads of ICs, almost as many, half as many ICs as there are capacitors. And the problem is those are very difficult to get replacement parts for on these, a lot of them you have to outsource and look to eBay. And it's like $15 per chip. Anyway, that's this power supply. It just needs to be clean. And then we can move on to the larger and more important main chassis. All right. So here's the first look at our main board and, you know, you could go crazy and recap this entire board. But 99 percent of the time, that is not going to be beneficial, really. Not an entire recap, unless there's an issue that you just can't figure out. You want to recap it because there's a lot of little spots in here. And it's difficult to recap this without ultimately, you know, if you don't have a lot of experience, you could damage a trace on something and render your monitor useless. But the most important capacitors on something like this, where it's still functioning, yet needs to be kind of checked on preventive maintenance are some caps over in this area. Next to this heat sink, I've done a video in the past where these specific caps control vertical blanking and could cause the red, green and blue lines to drift into your screen. And that's actually a design flaw by Sony on the capacitors that came in this chassis standard. Now, it doesn't always fail, but it's definitely something that came out in a service bulletin and that we need to make sure that we service and, you know, preventively maintain this by changing at least those two capacitors. This is our flyback transformer over here. So that's an important part. And then let's see some other important parts. This is our hot is what they like to call it. And it's just our horizontal out. Trans transformer, I think, or anyway, that's called the hot right there that I see the capacitors. I'll show you which ones exactly we're going to remove. It's actually this capacitor right here and this one right next to it on the other side of the heat sink. That's capacitors five, seven, two and five, eight, four. Let's go ahead and do that just by. Here's those two capacitors. Five eighty four is originally a one micro farad one 60 volt. And the next one is a one sixty four point seven micro farad. So let's let's see what we're going to use to replace these two. And we'll also test and see what the micro farad readings are on these two capacitors. All right, here's my replacement caps. First off, they are both 105 C or Celsius temperature rated, which is important. Now, the first one that is the 160 volt slash four point seven micro farad. I'm going to increase that to a 10 micro farad. I'm going to maintain the 160 volts, but I'm going to go up on the micro farad on there, and that is acceptable according to the Sony service bulletin. I'm sorry that I don't have that service bulletin available. I just remember that from another video I made. And if you want to see those videos, I'll link to them in the description here. And then I'm going to upgrade this second cap that was in C 572, which is a 160 micro farad by or 160 volt, excuse me, by one micro farad. And I'm going to increase that to 250 volt and one micro farad. These are Nishikon caps, high performance. Just look at how much size this capacitor is compared to that. And this one's supposed to be higher quality, better rated and just look how much a lot of it like different in size. This one's pretty similar. It's just obviously been shortened a lot. So that's, that's actually encouraging. But that one's a lot smaller than the one that's come out. So we'll do that. Let's also test these capacitors to see what they look like. We installed now. Let's go ahead now and hook up this first capacitor, which is just one micro farad. I've calibrated my prongs. Should be able to put that in there. Nano farads. Let's go and do frequency 120 Hertz. So when you look in here, 983 nano farads, I believe that should mean that's like 0.983 micro farads. So that's actually within tolerance. Let's check the other one. This one should be 4.7. So we've got 3.6, 4.7 to 3.6. So this one is wearing down. We're definitely past 20 to 25 percent on our cap. So this is this cap right here, which is the one. What was the one on the inside 4.7? It's actually starting to go down and fail. So, you know, it could have been another year. It could have been another month. It could have been another three years. But eventually this would get to a point where it would probably wear down even more. And at that point, it would show the red, green and blue lines on the screen and you'd overcorrect. And eventually this would just pass or fail. And then, you know, it could cause more trouble down the line. I'm just plugging in my AC power right now. All right, everything looks normal on here as the menu is filled up. Now we're going to need to get in here and calibrate. Before I do that, I want to show you on this blank screen how to get into the submenu. Start from your main screen here, press menu. You'll pull up your main menu and then you press the D-Gauss and Enter simultaneously. And it pulls up your submenu. And to move through submenu, you just use the menu and the enter button to go up and down. And you can see here, for example, this is our vertical center. Here's our setting. It's number seven. You can go up and down on that, but we'll do that while we're calibrating. And what we're going to do today is we're going to really be concentrating on settings number 17 and down. 16, 15, 14, 13, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, number 5. And that should be just about it for the ones we're concerned with. You're making an adjustment to the number by pressing either up or down. Just some tips. This little indicator, it will show what the current setting that is saved is. So right now it's saved at 15. If I go to 10 or 11 and I'm playing with it, I can't remember what it was. Well, as I scroll through back and up and down, it will tell me by putting that marker there. Another thing is this will not save the settings or any changes I do until I press D-Gauss once and it says right. And then I got a press D-Gauss again and it will say right again and you will get that little asterisk that must show. And that means you have written the changes in the settings to the menu and now from now on it will power on, it will start up. Now, if you get in here and again, you don't remember what your setting is or you don't like your setting and you want to reset. You can always power the monitor off and then power it back on and none of your settings will be saved. It will go back to the last default save. Also, you can pull out of the menu, the sub-menu that is, and then just press D-Gauss and it should go back to, it should kick you out of basically the sub-menu and then go all the way back to the original settings. But just to be safe, you can always just power it off and then power it back on. Alright, so we're going to go ahead and start now calibrating the screen for geometry. The color looks good enough, at least to the eye, so that you can use the built-in color palettes. There are multiple different color temperatures. Another thing you'll want to consider is not to close your PVM up or put the shell back on until after you finish your calibration. Because if you have an issue where you have a screen tilt or any kind of convergence that you're going to want to correct, you'll have to do that from behind the monitor. Even if you power it off, make the adjustment, and then power it on to see how it went, you'll still have to do all that from the backside of the monitor with the shell off. And then if you have the rest of that set, though, and you're very confident already in the screen tilt and the convergence, then you can put your shell on and calibrate after that. And that's just going to affect the horizontal and vertical geometry and then the corners and sides and the linearity. It's a little easier to see from the inside if you can see how it's bump and bezeled out. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to sit on my rug and I'm going to just use a little hammer and tamp it down a little bit so to flatten it out. And I'm going to put a second shirt, fold it over, kind of rag, and put that in between the hammer and the metal. In a way, I don't directly hit it with the hammer and causing it to hit the metal. It was pretty large, that divot originally, and it affected this whole area, and that center point was just pushed in pretty far. Pretty minor at this point, and I don't know that me really using the hammer on it will help it any. It does kind of move a little bit, so if you had some more malleable tools, you might... I want to secure this neck board right here in a place with putting this product right here, black RTV silicone, and it's not going to take much. And it's removable too, so if you need to come in here and do another service job in five, ten years, it's very easy to cut through this and just pull it all off. Yet it will maintain a good bond there and hold that neck board in place on the CRT itself like it did before from the factory. This can also be used to secure things up around the deflection yoke too if you need to put in, say, a convergent strip or a magnet or something. If you need to add anything, you can add this to the back of the tube, it won't hurt it. And it's definitely better than using a tape or any other kind of adhesive that could permanently bond. The last thing to do is to put the shell back on. You always want to check your screen after you put the shell on. Sometimes you'll have some weird interference that you may not have been able to see before you had the shell while it was still off. Let's test another game out and see how it looks. So at the end of the day, this is a pretty nice PVM. It's been checked out. I feel confident that you should be able to get plenty of years of usage off it, especially for retro gaming. And what I mean by that is you should easily get 3,000 hours of usage on this without any real need for another adjustment. Thanks again for watching today. I am Steve with Retro Tech. I sincerely appreciate all your questions and comments. So please leave those below and I'll see you guys next time with some more retro content.