The producer I was engineering for brought with him his Lexicon 960L reverb unit. What do you call this? Vintage digital? Modern Classic? It’s a a beast regardless, in the quality of its effects but also in its imposing 4u footprint and the ambient noise it spits out. The internal fans and especially the hard disk drive are very loud and without the luxury of a separate machine room here it was noisy enough that we couldn’t use it without distraction. I wanted to see if I could do something about that.
The 960L is a digital, 5.1 surround capable reverb and delay box released around the turn of the millennium. At time of release it was definitely the most sophisticated device of its kind, working at sample rates up to 96kHz. This one is spec’d out with all the available options I’m aware of, like digital or analog in, expansion DSP for multichannel operation and including the LARC2 remote control unit.
The LARC2 has 8 motor faders automatable via MIDI, a surround panner joystick and a colour LCD display. The screen doesn’t have the contrast or resolution you would expect from a more recent device but it does the job and would have been pretty impressive in 2001.
I brought the 960 home, propped it on my bench and had a look around. It was immediately obvious that the guts of the thing were not much different from a PC or server, save for the digital signal processing, AD/DA conversion and input/output happening on custom expansion cards. This was a great design choice. I think it must have brought the cost of manufacture and development way down, not having to custom engineer every board. Instead they could assemble these based on standard, widely available parts and adapt an open-source OS into a nimble control platform for their hardware.
The form factor they used (NLX) is esoteric and I had to do a little digging around to figure out how things fit together and why. Apparently NLX was common for a few years in the late nineties, used by manufacturers like Dell and Gateway in their ‘compact desktop’ models. I think that by the time the 960L was released it had already fallen by the wayside but you have to figure it took many years of development to bring these to market. Thankfully, the design team opted for a standard ATX power supply unit as this is one of the components I wanted to upgrade. There was nothing wrong with the original 250W PSU except for the little fan spinning at a high RPM was a bit noisy.
I used this modern, very quiet ATX power supply as a replacement. Rated for 650W, it’s far beyond what’s necessary to power the 960L but it was cheap, it fits in the case and the 120mm doesn’t need to spin very fast to move a lot of air. You can see that it is well ventilated as well. Since it will be working way under capacity, I expect it will operate at a consistently low temperature, guaranteeing many more years of use.
I removed the CPU heatsink and fan as seen above. Unfortunately I neglected to take a picture of the old ones. Afterward I cleaned off the crusty old thermal paste using a cotton swap and some anhydrous isopropyl alcohol.
PC fans have come a long way since the 90s. Demand from gamers and hobbyists has spurned the development of quieter, more efficient designs. Pictured above are extra quiet fans from Noctua on the side panel and CPU. I replaced the heatsink with one that has a little more thermal capacity and used a resistor in line with the CPU fan to slow its spin rate a little. (I later confirmed with Lexicon’s diagnostic menu that the CPU was still running at a healthy temperature during use.)
After these steps I powered up the 960L and to my dismay, it was still unacceptably loud. I guess I’d forgotten just how loud those old spinning disk drives were in the 90s. I probably could have replaced it with a newer mechanical drive and gotten a tolerable improvement in ambient noise but searching on Amazon I found a solid state drive with the antiquated IDE controller and interface. Ultimately this is what I went with.
I started by removing the original HDD and cloning it to a disk image. I restored this image to the replacement drive and mounted the new drive to the old one using heavy duty adhesive velcro strips.
I had to use the adapter seen in the image above to connect the smaller 2.5″ laptop drive to the larger, desktop format IDE and Molex connectors.
And after all that it works a treat. I didn’t time it carefully but I do think it boots a little quicker now, reading from the solid state drive. I wish I could say that it’s imperceptibly quiet now but it isn’t. However it’s quieter than the Mac Pro tower used in the studio and definitely not putting out any more ambient noise than other fan equipped devices in our rack. Total cost in parts was about $300CAD. See below for a list of parts used.
June 2022 Update: This article has proven to be the most popular page on my blog by an order of magnitude. I have received private messages of thanks and requests for further information from studios and engineers around the world which brings me great joy. If you need a disk image or simply want to chat, you’re encouraged to reach out via the Contact page on this blog.
I share my experience here for free. If you’re feeling generous you are welcome to buy me a coffee.
CS Series™ Modular CS650M — 650 Watt 80 PLUS® Gold Certified PSU
Noctua NF-A9 PWM AAO Frame Design, SSO2 Bearing Premium Quality Quiet Fan
Noctua 60x25mm A-Series Blades with AAO Frame, SSO2 Premium Fan, NF-A6x25 PWM
StarTech.com FANDURONTB 60x65mm Socket A CPU Cooler
32GB KingSpec 2.5-inch PATA/IDE SSD Solid State Disk (MLC Flash) SM2236 Controller
20 Comments
Linus
June 18, 2018 - 16:25Any chance you did save a copy of the disk image? Sent you a mail earlier this week. Thanks
Evan Desjardins
January 4, 2019 - 13:48I never got your mail and just saw this. I never typically get comments here so I rarely if ever check. Obviously I’m way late in responding but if you still need it I can provide the image I think.
Diego Piotto
May 11, 2019 - 13:48Hi, nice guide Evan! My unit is in a separate machine room so I don’t need to quiet it down. I think I have a problem with the hard drive of my 960L, I haven’t been able to clone the drive to a new one or save a backup and than copy to a new. Can you please send me the copy of your disk image? My Lexicon was running software version 4.0.2.
Evan Desjardins
May 15, 2019 - 15:17Thanks for visiting, Diego. I sent you an email to the address you gave.
jonlee
January 7, 2022 - 06:43I want to replace the HDD, how can I clone the original hard disk to a new one, please tell me what to do, thank you very much!
Evan Desjardins
January 7, 2022 - 11:43You want to remove the original drive from the 960L, connect it to your PC and use a tool like CloneZilla to do a bit for bit clone to the new drive. This will carry over the partition table and filesystem, not just the system files, which should make the new drive bootable.
Alex Lamy
July 4, 2019 - 06:51Hi Evan. Firstly, thanks for taking the time to do this – I’ve just upgraded the fans in our recently purchased 960L using your guide and recommendations, and the difference is remarkable! I’m about to do the hard drive too – is it possible to get the disk image from you as Diego did previously? I’ve yet to attempt cloning the original drive.
Cheers! Alex.
Infernal machine
September 21, 2019 - 09:47Hello, This is a great page and very helpful,i just replaced the PSU with the same you recommended.
I would appreciate if you are willing to share me the HD image so i can update the machine with a SSD in an easy way.
I have send you an email but not sure if you received it.
Cordialement
Evan Desjardins
September 21, 2019 - 10:03Thanks for your comment. Please email me directly via the address found at gardensound.ca. my contact form here appears to be broken.
Gokhan
February 5, 2020 - 12:26Hi evan,
i have disk drive problem too..i got new drive but need hd image..can you share with me too?
thanks
Gokhan
Michal Bechyne
February 24, 2020 - 17:44Good day
Sir
First of all, I’m sorry for the translation, I use the Google Translate. I got a Lexicon 960L and unfortunately it is probably a defective disk and I found in the discussion that I could get a disk image from you. I am an amateur sound engineer and I would like to put this device into operation. I like effects 5.1. I work with video and I would like to use it there. Thank you in advance for your willingness.
Michal Bechyne
Czech republic, Prague
Steven
August 18, 2020 - 11:52Hello,How where you able to run the Noctua case fan,because its PWM version?
Evan Desjardins
August 18, 2020 - 12:14You can connect the 4 pin connector to the 3 pin header no problem.
Steven
August 19, 2020 - 11:09^ Merci Beaucoup!
Another question: The 960L image is 80GB,Is it possible to 1/1 copy the raw .img taken from the 960L HD to the 32GB SSD you have? (i bought the same SSD)
Evan Desjardins
August 19, 2020 - 13:12My disc image was much smaller than that. Drop me a line at evan at gardensound dot ca and I’ll share it with you.
Steven
August 19, 2020 - 16:48Ah damned,i tried to burn the 80Gb image to an SSD,then resizing the 4 partitions and copy them to the 32GB SSD,but no luck.
I guess it need a true disk image of the 4 partitions together to work.
I send you a message.
simonluka
October 17, 2020 - 06:51Can someone please send to me the hard disk image? My 960’s hard disk is broken….
Thanks!
simonluka
October 17, 2020 - 06:55can someone please send to me the image that my 960’s hard disk is broken?
Thank you very much
simonluka
October 17, 2020 - 08:09Can someone please send to me the image (my 960’s hard drive is broken)?
Thank you very much
Simonluka
October 19, 2020 - 07:05Please can you send to me the image too?
Thanks