 Hey everybody, welcome back today to Retro Tech. You know I'm out here in the off-loading area and we're going to be talking about big CRTs again. Now look right behind me is the JVC 36 inch consumer grade D-series television and this is one of the most legendary consumer grade TVs that is in a shadow mass CRT and one of those reasons is the enormous size of this thing. Just look at how big this is. However, the CRT I'm going to talk about today is not the JVC D-series, although it's great. We're gonna look at a repair I've been working on. So there's a swing around here. There's our good buddy Brutus getting comfy down here. You'll notice while we've got big CRTs everywhere. Today, we're gonna be following up on our lovely 2530 series CRT. That's the PVM right here that you see a skeleton of. This one has been gutted for most of the valuable parts. There's normally a board right here, a new board on the other side and some on the back. But this should be a good example of what the inside of one of these machines looks like if you want a closer look. Now there's one part on here that is kind of a pain as far as this whole setup goes and it's this. This assembly right here, H-Stats built into this. This is not normally like this on the other 30 series. They don't have this potentiometer that controls H-Stat. What ends up happening is over time you get shorts inside this thing and that just pretty much makes the part useless. It has to be replaced. It's very hard to find replacements of this. So you can have the entire monitor be pretty much useless if this H-Stat goes out and the way it goes out is the picture just starts to shrivel and shrink and then it ultimately just shorts out completely after it's turned on for a minute. Here's this unique yoke down here. Lots of copper in there and then we've got a separate neck connection here on the actual neck of the tube for convergence controls. And one of the only boards that remains is our C neck board and then our audio amp. But this 2530 is obviously not the one we're going to be looking at. That's going to be this one. We're following up to our repair here, the wiggly wire repair where we repaired the wiggly wire down here. This thing has been a beast. I wish I was joking when I said that, but it's been just a colossal undertaking. I've had to rebuild nearly every single board inside this PVM. First, let's start on this side. This is our video board. Please just notice all the lovely points on there where you have a component going through a hole and being soldered onto this board. I will show you some photos. I had to reflow solder on every single point on this board. And that was just because after I'd fixed something, something else would stop working. And it was all because of cold solder joints, especially on this particular board. I even reflowed the solder on this little daughter or junction box board, whatever you want to call it. I think it was labeled as H6 and it's just a spot where cables go in and cables come out. So I had to re-solder that. There's also some daughter boards like this one. I reflowed all the solder on the two daughter boards that are on this bigger board. The one board I really did not have to solder with or mess with or do anything to was the audio amp right here. However, this one did need to have the original input board replaced. I replaced it with another one from a working unit that was in much better condition. And the reason is because of the condition of that input board, it was just torn up. There was a lot of busted capacitors. I'll show you it here. It's also had some bad connection points where it looked like we had lost maybe some inputs for corrosion. And more trouble would have come from that than what it was worth. But one of the boards I did have to rebuild and reflow solder on all the points also was this seaboard. So it was recapped and all the solder was reflowed on it. Right next to that you have the D2 daughter deflection board, which controls a lot of the secondary convergence and dynamic convergence controls on this CRT with those potentiometers right there. And this one was recaptured and rebuilt, so that's another board in there that was recaptured and rebuilt. And we have our main deflection board on this side, which is always got to be rebuilt, at least some portion of it. And I want to show you some of the important stuff on here. It looks a lot like the 2030. And there's a part where we had a trace damaged over time, had to repair right next to that H center potentiometer. So that's how you would adjust the centerness of your picture. And then you can see we've got vertical angle written right there, and that actually leads down to this potentiometer. So those are two controls that you'll have on here that are for geometry. If we go down here some more, there's H size again, right under that is our normal pin cushion. And then we have T pin for top pin, bottom pin, PN, BPN, that's what that is for. And then we've got a pin out right there on that potentiometer. So there is some controls on here for certain geometries. There's vertical size and center right next to each other. And I want to show you, even after you've recapped the boards, what you can expect for image quality here in a second. We're going to get around and fire this one up. I just didn't want to turn it on because it's very loud back here with the hissing. From the flyback transformer, it will definitely show up on the tape. So let me show you down into the back of this CRT, one that is fully populated. You can see just miles of cables inside here. And everything again inside of this monitor was serviced. If you see that metal encased box down there, that is the main power supply. It too was rebuilt. So that had to be retrieved from inside here and then rebuilt also. So that's a total of one, two, three, four, five. And then with the daughter boards, there's three more daughter boards that were all reworked. And then this one was replaced. I mean, it's a ton of just hours of my life. And Brutus' life invested in this wonderful monitor. What do you think of it, Brutus? Yeah, it's pretty awesome. So one of the big issues and challenges I've been going through is the temperature. The temperature in my shop. Let's see what it is right now. So that's Fahrenheit on the left and Celsius probably on the right. See right over, what is that, 12 degrees Celsius, just above 50, almost 55 degrees Fahrenheit, which is safe. It's safe to kind of work on this and test it in this temperature. But the last couple of days, it's actually been too cold to fire this thing up. Let's talk a little bit more about how you would adjust this PVM. Again, I've shown you those potentiometer holes in there. You're going to need a very small screwdriver. And unfortunately, you will have to have power running to the screen when you make these adjustments. And then you pull up your geometry pattern. That could be the monoscope pattern, for example, from the 240p test suite. Pull it up on your device and then use that monoscope pattern to adjust things like the horizontal size, the horizontal center and vertical size and center and also your aspect ratio. But I do need to warn you, when you look at things like your pin settings and your edge settings on this monitor, do not expect amazing results. I have worked on plenty of these. And for the most part, they do not have good dynamic conversions. They do not have good edge geometry. It really suffers from that in that oversized area. Now you can get this image looking pretty good in the middle of the screen. And you can also, if you're just using it for like 480i content, which this mostly would have been used for back in the day, you can get away with that bad geometry and convergence on the edges because it kind of washes out in the picture. So first things first, it is loaded up with RGB at the moment and Super Nintendo. Now you may notice some snow drifting across the screen. Unfortunately, my power supply just died on me for the OEM power supply. So I had to use a backup power supply, which does not produce great image. It's not something you should really use unless it's an emergency situation, which we're in today. But this should not hinder us too much. I just want to show you the initial issue right here. And that is with the buttons. When I press the controls and I try to turn on the controls, it takes a second for them to respond to my touch. Let me show you what I mean. I'm going to try to switch over to the B line input. And if I just tap it, see, I have to hold it down for a second for it to go. And then it will go. And then the same thing, if I want to switch back to another one, I have to press it and hold it down. And then eventually it'll switch over to that. Now that's not normal how it goes. So there's a VTR, for example. It's got S-video running cleanly with that N64 right there. So that's an example of one issue that I've not been able really to get rid of. It's working fine, but the buttons are taking a second to switch back and forth. You have to press it and kind of hold it. All right, I've got this kind of set up in a good enough spot where you can tell the screen geometry. And at first look, I know you're going to see some issues. First off with the monoscope pattern. Let's pull this up. Now this screen struggles to do a lot of great things on here. And what I mean is it's, there's always some issue with convergence on bigger tubes like this from this time period. Generally, it'll be along the top. And if you go back and look at the back of the monitor, it's just loaded with convergence strips. And also, unfortunately, the nature of this older plastic is it's so brittle, making adjustments to it will only risk further damaging it. And so we can't concern ourselves too much with our edge geometry and our edge convergence around the top. And at the sides, this is about as straight a line as you can get on this. You cannot get it straighter really. It's always just looks a little wonky on the sides. And so if you're going to be looking at your geometry all day, this is not really the best monitor to have for this. Because another reason is it's so difficult to make an adjustment, like I showed you by taking the shell off and then adjusting those potentiometers. But this is what I would consider a good adjusted screen here. We'll look at some other things. You'll notice a little bit of issues here on this, just not the greatest pin controls on this monitor. Here's our linearity. And again, we have convergence issues again at the top mostly. These two corners are better, but not perfect. And this is just the nature of the beast, the larger you go, the more difficult time you're having with your screen. Alright guys, thanks a bunch for watching today. I really appreciate it. Let me know what you think of the Sony PBM 2530. Do you still like it despite its drawbacks? It's still got that great iconic cube design, so it is highly desirable. And there aren't too many Trinitron tubes from this time period that are this large and still something that you'd want to have. So I still find it to be one of those amazing CRTs to me, just as an example of awesome technology from the time period. But personally, I'm going to be glad to be done with this one. It's just got a ton of circuit boards in it, a bunch of things that can go wrong with it. And so unless you're highly skilled or have somebody that can really take a deep dive and look into the monitor for you, I don't normally recommend this as one you should own. Like I said, unless it's been restored and it's in good shape. Thanks again for watching. I will see you guys next time with some more retro content.