CurtPalme.com Home Theater Forum

MrF · Joined: 06 Feb 2018 Posts: 4 Location: France

Hi all, new here, I've had some contact with Kal years ago about trying to buy a moome hdmi card for my Barco mistakenly (as in I thought 508=mostly same as 808) but thats about it so far apart from lurking, until now.
I have currently a Barco 508, the non Barco weird badged Barco, with the passive cooling. I've had it for 10 years now when it replaced a barco vision600 that expired, and its been ok, but last week it seemed to go blurred on the right hand of the screen area and the convergence went bad, and yesterday I turned it all on, and it started to display, then I heard a squeal from the case and it shut down, now it wont light up at all. I know how to get the internal menus to generate a signal to display them even when no external signal is present, although I've fed it a composite and had the sync led light up to indicate its getting good input still also.

I've de-cased it in situ on the mount (I can take pics if anyone is interested in what the chassis looks like, as its such a oddball), and there's no steady red lights indicating that there is a issue or rail missing, the green leds are all lit solid also, and the very rear of the tubes are very faintly glowing. There is one red led which flicks during boot up, but that extinguishes after a instant, and I read that with other barco's a red led is only bad if it stays on. As I have no detail on this oddball chassis I have no idea if the same applies, or if the markings on the leds map the same meanings or anything.

So the question becomes, does anyone have any suggestions on how to check it out further before declaring it dead? Pull the ht connections to each tube in sequence in case one tube is shorting out or something?

Yes I'd really like to upgrade it, I'm chasing a sony 1292 and looking at a barco 1208 both of which will be considerable upgrades for this unit and I'll be able to go to hdmi instead of the composite which doesn't cut it for modern use, although budgets are *really* tight right now so if I can get it going and use it for a few more months while I scrape together funds that would be awesome.

Any ideas from people? I have a oscilloscope and meter, though I'm not overly familiar with crt circuitry innards.

**Curt Palme** · Posted: Wed Feb 07, 2018 2:42 pm Post subject:

OUt of the 1000s of CRT projectors I've worked on, the 508 is one I've never seen before, as it was not sold in North America, and not many were sold in Europe.

About all I can offer is to check the power supply voltages first, and disconnect the loads to see if there is a short on one of the power supply lines.

Other than that, chase other CRT projectors, as the Vision designation indicates that the 508 does not scan very high, and in all likelihood, will not display even 720p.

**kal** · Posted: Wed Feb 07, 2018 7:38 pm Post subject:

Yep - The BarcoVision 508 is limited to 576i as the max scanrate is 15.6Khz:

http://www.curtpalme.com/PJSpecs_Barco.shtm

Brochure/Spec sheet: http://www.curtpalme.com/docs/BarcoVision508_Brochure.pdf

Kal

**AnalogRocks** · Posted: Thu Feb 08, 2018 2:05 am Post subject:

Anyone else read this tittle and think: "Where did all those people die?!" Laughing

km987654 · Posted: Thu Feb 08, 2018 5:16 am Post subject:

MrF · Joined: 06 Feb 2018 Posts: 4 Location: France

Sorry to disappoint but in my defence it is on topic in the CRT forum, I guess it was the 508 being so little known that threw people. In retrospect, perhaps a title of "Barco 508" might have been better Smile

edit, I've fixed the title now if the above line creates confusion to new readers.

Curt, I am chasing but want to step up to something from your "mid range" list, I've had the low end sets too many years now and its time to trade up a little. HDMI would be really nice, I've mostly used it to display kodi boxes and older games consoles which composite suited perfectly, but now I have later generation consoles in my collection too, its getting harder to read the dialogues.
This 508 came from a small ad in Paris and we drove up and picked it up but I have no idea how it got there, it just came up at the right time when my 600 let out the magic HT smoke. I believe it has about 2500 hours on the tubes last time I checked the counters.

For the meantime, I've checked the voltage rail test points and they are all ok. The only possible thing I have noticed from observations is the clear neck of the blue gun looks really discoloured and completely different to the red and green tube appearances so maybe its leaked and shorted out internally, I pulled the annode ht connection but that has had no effect so II'm thinking the next step is to pull that tube. Would it be ok to fire the projector up with no load at all on the blue tube circuits to sink into?

**AnalogRocks** · Posted: Fri Feb 09, 2018 5:36 pm Post subject:

Pull the blue neck card off, isolate it so it's not shorting on anything and see if the projector will fire up.

**Curt Palme** · Posted: Fri Feb 09, 2018 5:49 pm Post subject:

MrF · Joined: 06 Feb 2018 Posts: 4 Location: France

Blue tube is isolated, but its still not doing anything different. I had a good look round inside, and removing some screws allows half the chassis to swing free of the main one, and that gives better access to boards etc although I'm proceeding super nervously so the HT doesn't bite me, I've had some dealings with crt arcade monitors to make me cautious of stored HT charges...

I also had a poke around the net, and should this benefit anyone else, the cine6 is apparently a later development of the 508 chassis, and I've been able to find the technical documentation for a cine6 on the internet here :-
https://onedrive.live.com/?authkey=%21AGEIq1FwZ2KjYIM&cid=74FD44B1DCA0BC04&id=74FD44B1DCA0BC04%21462&parId=74FD44B1DCA0BC04%21461&action=locate

I'm slowly going through the technical details in the iso and it does indeed have the boards mentioned in the locations the same as the cine6, so its looking more promising. I may be able to fault find a bit better now with some more information.