theta casablanca
overview
I’ve got an old Theta Casablanca with a broken display board for and I’m gutting it for the case to use on another project. It’s a great case for recycle/reuse, but also a curious, high end, piece of gear to examine. This is one of the few successful examples of a for-profit electronics company designing for a long term future.
what’s this?
The Theta Casablanca is a preamp / surround processor from the mid 90s. It’s still made today, albeit upgraded from what you’ll see here- those upgrades due to the extremely flexible architecture of the system itself. I’ve owned one of these in the past, bought used, implemented it, did some upgrades and repairs, and sold it off again because I’m a stereo/trifield guy and more interested in a MiniDSP in this role, from a technical perspective.
Empirically I don’t know how this Theta would measure (SINAD). My old one sounded good and I’m picky, but I know it wouldn’t come close to state of the art today, both because I’m sure some of the Theta is marking fluff, and the market has moved vastly onward toward transparency in DACs, now achieved at modest cost.
However, that exposure was burned into my “ideas file” as a hobbyist. My modern setups may measure far better, but none of them have anything like the physical trappings of the Theta. Back in the day, this was like $11k-$18k worth of processor, so that money went somewhere. Thankfully for the tinkerer who wants a case, part of it went into something highly modular and standard, with a nice milled aluminum face, RF shields to keep neighboring components happy, and mounts and standoffs aplenty for adding gear.
teardown
The architecture, as you can see, consists of a number of cards on a common backplane. Some of these cards are just processors, with no external ports, and others are interface cards, like DACs or analog inputs.
processor cards
Here’s the processor cards for surround codecs.
i/o cards
And the various I/O cards. This Theta Casablanca was pretty basic in configuration, but that’s perfect because I’m only after the case. “Basic” here still cost probably ten grand!
The true achievement of this product is sticking to its promise. This thing has been around since 1996 on the market, and yeah, it’s old now and hasn’t been upgraded in too long, but it went from early digital processor years into today due to the company’s commitment to their upgrades and common architecture. That’s commendable, and I suspect only (if that) achievable at the costs these sold for. The world would be a better place if more things were meant to be longer term purchases, upgradeable, and then the manufacturers actually followed through on that intent, as happened here.
power supply
The (extremely heavy, very much testing the limits of a PCB card) power supply. It’s a beast.
display panel
The display panel. On this unit, the display was broken but everything else worked well. I’m keeping the display PCB as a template for mounting my own buttons in the future.
Also, a reveal! You can see the tinted front lens for the display has some electrical tape on it… what feature did they not implement here?!
Turns out it was just an empty place for a decal in the future, covered over under the electrical tape with sharpie!
In my previous Casablanca, these spots had other decals in them, like “Jitter Jail” and “Circle Surround” or something, so Theta did give you more light-up stuff as you upgraded.
backplane
The backplane itself, where all cards plug in.
faceplate
And the really nice milled faceplate, which is split so you can upgrade the model designation or the button panel separately.
case shell
Far too many types of fasteners were used in this case. They really needed to standardize a bit here, this is one of the most obvious issues with an otherwise very solid piece of design, and would make servicing a bit harder than necessary.
rf shields & braces
There design of the braces and the RF shields is good. The case is quite rigid when they’re in place, everything is thicker gauge than you’d expect today, and fits together well.
reuse
All done, ready for storage until my project. You can see how this would be useful with so many ports and button interfaces I can repurpose. What exactly I’ll do is TBD, but likely it’ll be a homemade DSP controller of some kind for a future audio project.
