Sony PVM-2030 (Thanks Matt!) Tune Up

One of my… Let me re-phrase this. My favorite TV design of all time is the Sony PVM “cube” monitor. It’s an early 80s television set where the back of the TV is framed in with a plastic and perhaps metal frame that makes the TV perfectly square. On the left and right of the screen there are touch buttons. The text of the buttons is invisible until you press one button that turns on illumination behind these. It’s just so damn cool, and it’s from the early 80s.

I owned one before, a 25″ or 27″ model. But the picture wouldn’t always come on and I didn’t know why. At that point in my life I was still under the idea that I would never, ever, repair televisions. High voltage risk and all that. My attitude changed when I got my 2nd arcade cabinet and it had a failing Wells Gardner open frame monitor in it. But my early 25″ or 27″ PVM monitor would snap and the picture would go away. Or it wouldn’t come up at all. I now know the issue is probably the take off feed on the anode line from the flyback. But I sold that old monitor many years ago.

So it has been kind of a thing to want to pick up one of the smaller 20″ versions of my favorite TV. I’m not a super CRT enthusiast, I keep a few around for old computers. I keep my arcades on CRTs. But I don’t consider myself a die hard.

Opportunity hit and my good friend Matt had a PVM-2030 that was said to not work. And I could have it. Thanks Matt! So he brought it to me on one of his trips up to my area. I finally got around to checking it out. It just seemed to work. No repairs needed! It has some rash, some rough scrapes on one side. But who looks at the side.

I hooked it up to what I had laying around. I was too lazy to hook it up to the sencore signal generator that I usually use to poke at arcade monitors. But I found an old Video Essentials DVD and threw it in an XBox Classic. Things were looking okay! Until I noticed that the picture was kind of crooked. And maybe some convergence issues.

Off came the cover!

First thing I did was to hunt for the schematics. I couldn’t find them. I did find the PVM-2530 schematics, and low and behold there is an adjustment that will rotate the screen. Except the PCB it is on in the PVM-2530 model doesn’t exist in the PVM-2030. Most likely old caps have caused it to drift. So my fix, with a ton of sweat was to rotate the yoke on the neck of the CRT. Rubber mallet and stick, true sweat.

There are some adjustments found through holes on the sides. I used plastic CRT adjustment tools that can be found from electronics parts places. Blue plastic thing with rainbow of tools. The tools are poor quality, and I was disappointed when I tried to use them to adjust arcade monitors (mainly the hex width coil on G07.) But they came in handy with the Sony.

I don’t have the speakers for the TV, they were an option and mount to the sides. They come up on feeBay from time to time for around $50. I might pick a set up some day. I will only go for the “APM” flat and square speakers since those were the ones I remember.

I haven’t built any fun cables for the RGB input. IIRC I could probably feed the output from an arcade PCB to this TV, or maybe an Amiga.

I sharpened the picture up a bit and tried my best with the convergence playing with the rings on the back of the neck. That too took a good amount of time. There is still convergence drift on a test pattern in some of the corners as I recall.

Overall though, mission accomplished! Still an awesome physical design. I think PVMs became way more advanced and my choice of one from that point lead to a TV that does not have as good of a picture that later (and especially the Broadcast series BVM) but whatever. Also, those sexy pushbuttons for adjustments? Without onscreen displays and without some indication that you are in the middle it is impossible to tell what the settings are. If you touch the balance adjustment on the set for the audio there is no way to “center” it again without hitting the reset button, and that reset button will reset all picture tweaks. So that aspect of the TV really falls short.

I do hope the schematics for the set become public at some point. That would be helpful.

Sony PVM-2030 tune up

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