NuTone Concerto Programmable Musical Chime Model LA60

The fabulous Concerto --- plays any tune you can whistle, sing or hum!

Let there be music. . . whenever someone comes to your front door!

NuTone's beautiful Concerto is virtually a musical instrument. . . with a charming talent for announcing your callers in more exciting, innovative ways than ever before!

It plays any tune for which you have music, 16 fixed tunes or any tune you care to compose!

'Play' any musical score!

Concerto's computerized musical key-board gives you two octaves of 24 notes including sharps and flats. . plus six note-lengths, from 1/8 notes to whole notes.  Using any standard musical score you can program Concerto to play any melody (up to 36 notes) that has a special meaning for you. Like your school songs!

Plays 16 fixed tunes!

16 different tunes are preprogrammed in the Concerto.  You select any one you wish to play simply by pressing four keys.

Compose your own tunes!

With NuTone's advanced electronics at your fingertips, it's easy as 1, 2, 3 for the musically-inclined to compose an original tune.

This NuTone LA60 Concerto suffered from a common problem, after 25 years it simply stopped working.

The common failure points for all NuTone Electronic Chimes are the power supply circuits and the tactile membrane key-pads.  When a device like an electronic chime is powered up on a continuous basis for 25 years, it will accumulate 220,000 hours of time on its electronic circuits.  Eventually something will fail, usually the failure is a long slow process that begins with just a little hum that you hear from the chime all of the time.

Over time the little hum will become louder and louder and finally one day, the chime won't ring.  Sometimes the failure is more dramatic and without any warning the chime just stops working.

That's what happened to this LA60, one day it worked fine, the next day it didn't.

The LA60 is a single circuit board design that featured some reasonably advanced electronics for its day.

The heart of the LA60 is Z105, the Microprocessor (blue arrow) that contains the preprogrammed tunes that are built into the  chime.  When you program you own music into the LA60, Z105 stores the programmed code for you tune.  The LA60 has a 9-volt backup battery which keeps the programmed code in Z105 safe in case of a power outage.  

Another common problem is Z106 (red arrow), which is the keyboard encoder IC.  These encoders tend to become problematic over time and finding replacements can be difficult.

The 'key-board' used in most NuTone Programmable Electronic Chimes, including the LA60 and LA61 is another source of trouble for these chimes.  The tactile "bubble" switch panel was made by Texas Instruments and was most often seen used with inexpensive pocket calculators.  The problem with these panels is that they loose their "bubble".  The metal bubble under the decorative overlay tends to go  flat, which then interrupts the use of adjoining bubble and the keyboard stops working.

These panels are no longer made and finding replacement can be difficult.  Since the same panel was used on all NuTone Chimes, with somewhat different overlays for the button operations, replacements can be salvaged from other chimes models.

Here's a short video with an overview of the repair of a LA60 and it's final testing after the repair was completed.

 Use this link to contact us about problems with your NuTone Electronic Chime