Powertran Chromatheque 5000

Powertran Chromatheque 5000 Lighting Controller

I built one of these lighting controllers when the design was first published in Electronics Today International back in December 1978. A complete kit of parts was available from Powertran Electronics in Andover. They supplied a wide range of Amplifier, Mixer and Musical Instrument kits of very high quality.

Sadly I lost both my Chromatheque 5000 and a Powertran SP2-200 Stereo Slave Amplifier when my van was broken into one night.

I saw a Chromatheque 5000 pop up on eBay so naturally I had to buy it.

As received from eBay. Very good cosmetic condition but as always, it needs to be thoroughly inspected before connecting it to the mains and some lamps.	First look inside. A big failure of the original design is that all the lamps had to be hard wired to the controller. Fine for an install but no good for Mobile work. As you can see the original builder of the kit added some external connectors for the lamps
As you can see the main incoming mains cable strain relief grommet has pulled out of the back panel. This needs to be refixed. There was also a mistake on the incoming mains wiring where the person who built the unit misread the instructions. It is now wired correctly.	One of the Triacs had a broken lead so a replacement triac was filled
The 10 ohm resistor in the earthy side of the Audio input sockets had released its magic smoke. A sign that the speaker lead feeding the audio into the unit had its polarity reversed. Easy to replace.	Another shortcoming of the original design was the lack of mimic indicators to see what the lights are doing. Something you cant easily see when you are behind all the lights so just like my original one I added some small neon indicators.
On my original unit I fitted Four Bulgin sockets to the rear panel along with externally mounted fuseholders. This time I fitted three Bulgin sockets because I dont need 4 and I only had 3. There are fuses internally but these are difficult to replace without taking the unit apart. I upgraded the internal fuses to 5A and fitted 2A in the external fuseholders.	Rear panel of the standard kit
The rear panel after I had performed my modifications. There is a 6 pin Minidin connector at the righ hand side which is a 0-10v input to be able to use the Chromatheque 5000 as a dimmer pack	This is an additional board that I build which is for the 0-10v input. It also has 5 presets to balance the audio signals to the channels in sound to light mode. This was something I did on my previous unit as some of the channels were a lot more sensitive than others
Front view of the modified Chromatheque 5000 sitting on top of my Powertran MPA 200 Mixer amp which I also aquired from eBay around 15 years ago

Powertran Chromatheque 5000 Lighting Controller

As received from eBay. Very good cosmetic condition but as always, it needs to be thoroughly inspected before connecting it to the mains and some lamps.

First look inside. A big failure of the original design is that all the lamps had to be hard wired to the controller. Fine for an install but no good for Mobile work. As you can see the original builder of the kit added some external connectors for the lamps

As you can see the main incoming mains cable strain relief grommet has pulled out of the back panel. This needs to be refixed. There was also a mistake on the incoming mains wiring where the person who built the unit misread the instructions. It is now wired correctly.

One of the Triacs had a broken lead so a replacement triac was filled

The 10 ohm resistor in the earthy side of the Audio input sockets had released its magic smoke. A sign that the speaker lead feeding the audio into the unit had its polarity reversed. Easy to replace.

Another shortcoming of the original design was the lack of mimic indicators to see what the lights are doing. Something you cant easily see when you are behind all the lights so just like my original one I added some small neon indicators.

Rear panel of the standard kit

The rear panel after I had performed my modifications. There is a 6 pin Minidin connector at the righ hand side which is a 0-10v input to be able to use the Chromatheque 5000 as a dimmer pack

This is an additional board that I build which is for the 0-10v input. It also has 5 presets to balance the audio signals to the channels in sound to light mode. This was something I did on my previous unit as some of the channels were a lot more sensitive than others

Front view of the modified Chromatheque 5000 sitting on top of my Powertran MPA 200 Mixer amp which I also aquired from eBay around 15 years ago