Empress ParaEQ Repair

This is another case of getting to look at something  nicer than I would normally get to play with. When it comes to guitar gear I am pretty cheap, and it's hard to justify spending a lot on "simple" pedals (this is a dumb distinction to make). Empress' ParaEq seems like it's probably worth it, it's a good idea executed really well.

This is basically a 3 band EQ (low, mid & high) with adjustable centre frequencies and independent Q settings. There is an input pad and a clean boost as well. The build quality is very high - the toggle switches are positioned behind a row of knobs to protect them from stomping feet, and the pots all have nice metal knobs. Empress seem to do pedal graphics with enough personality to not be completely boring to the eye.

Revision 7, Jan 6 2014. Copyright date is 2013...

Inside we have:
- OPA4134 & 2274A quad opamps, buffering, amplifying & filtering.
- an ADG442 analogue switch for the buffered bypass
- TC7760HE charge pump controller for a negative voltage rail.
- 16F630 Pic microcontroller, monitoring footswitches to change between relay and buffered bypass.
- a SOT223 package, marked "4576". I'm certain this is an LDO and I think I had the part number and looked over a datasheet but I have lost it again.

Plugged in, the pedal was completely dead. My little test amp was humming, which usually means a power supply is shorted out somewhere and some filter caps can't do their job. Measuring inside the pedal, the DC jack read at ~2.5V (using a 200mA Boss power supply).

Flush mounted DC jack

No through-hole anchors for the jack.

Something is pulling power to ground, usually this is a bad power filtering capacitor, bad IC or a shorted protection diode. Empress are using a surface mount DC jack which must be desoldered to remove the PCB from the enclosure. I guess they really wanted the power jack to sit flush with the edge of the case. I took it off to see if there are more parts or any damage on the backside.

There is nothing on the backside. I took pictures of pots while I was here.

Gain pots are B5K.

Frequency pots are marked "B1 P1416C"

As there are not too many ICs on the board I tried to order them in likelihood of failure and then removing them to see if the short cleared. Pulling these chips off is pretty fast with hot air.
The 7660 was first, as I have seen these fail before. No change. Then I removed U1, the sot-223 LDO and the short was gone - but as this chip is powering all the opamps I couldn't say of this was the problem or not. U101, a 2274A quad opamp had a mark on the casing which may have indicated some kind of failure, so I removed it and replaced U1. Short was gone, I now measured +8V at the opamp positive rail and -6V at the negative. It passed a signal, the LEDs now lit up when the footswitches were pressed, and the boost worked. The EQ controls did nothing, so obviously this opamp was handling some of the filtering.

U1 & U25(?) removed.

U101 removed, short cleared.

After soldering in a new opamp everything worked as expected. Re-soldering the power jack is easy with some kapton tape holding it flush to outside face of the enclosure.

This is a more useful design than I had expected, parametric EQ solves a different problem than a graphic EQ. It's much easier to sweep the frequency control with a high Q and identify exactly what will be boosted or cut, it always allows adjustment of frequencies "between" the bands available on a graphic EQ.

The only downside for longevity is the PIC - again, this is a programmed part. If it was bad I would not have been able to replace it and would have had to re-wire for true bypass.