Jose EB5AGV

Well, the switcher IC arrived yesterday and I installed it. Not a nice experience due to the soldering... It is a very tiny IC (about 5x5mm), with no pins on it, and a big ground area which makes soldering harder: This is the bad one: Kapton tape used to protect adjacent components: After some soldering and cleaning work (there are two pins joined by a trace on the PCB, is not a fault), here you have the new IC placed: Then the test, using a lab power supply, set at 9V 0.5A maximum... And the switcher generated positive and negative voltages, but not the right ones 🤯. It seemed like a problem on the ICs powered by this power supply. And, finally, I found there was a failure in one of the connections of the replaced IC and so the positive output had gone too high... And no less than 5 double opams had died (luckily, all same type). Oh well... I removed them, soldered another switcher IC (as it was just impossible to get the soldering right), and now I have +9 and -9Vdc 🥳 One of the damaged opamps: Now I am waiting for the replacement opamps to arrive. Let's hope once replaced (will do it one by one and recheck voltages carefully each time) the Venom will finally generate some noise! 😅

This is the third forum at least that you ask exactly the same... Why don't you take some time to learn synthesis?. You have been already given advice on that elsewhere (Sound on Sound tutorials) Trying to find shortcuts won't help in the long run, trust me PS: down-voting this won't help you to LEARN, which is what you seem to be avoiding at all means, looking just for an easy, no effort answer

I have had another hobby since I was a boy, electronics. It specialised in amateur radio and test equipment gear and I collected and fixed tons of related things for decades. That was the starting point of my 22 years of R&D work and also of my current electronics home lab (already for 12 years), where I develop my current job. So I can't really be angry about all those things which helped me to build my career. But, as happens with old synths, younger people just don't care about those nicely built HP / Tektronix/ Marconi ... generators, oscilloscopes and analysers, built to last using the very best materials, as gold plated PCB contacts, Teflon covered coaxial wires, heavy aluminium cast chassis and such. So now I have a warehouse full of yesteryear electronics which nobody but I seems to care about 🤔 It is not just for the large amount of money I have spent on that gear, which in perspective is as money burnt, but the lack of appreciation by my children / wife and by people in general, makes me sad, as the only way out is to trash most of it. I hope my growing collection of music gear does not end in a similar way. I am mostly interested on 80s plus synths (lots of them bought faulty and fixed by me) and accessories (well, and also some guitars, electronic drums, EWIs, amplifiers, ... 😬). My idea is to clean up the currently area full of radio and test gear and convert it into a music studio plus storage area for music gear. At least I will be able to use it and, in the future, my heirs can do what they wish with all of that (I hope it keeps some value so they can cash it, but don't lose my sleep for it 😅) Anyway, what would be of us without our toys? 😉

Just 50 units available, hurry up! 😅 Seriously, it seems like a good thing, kudos to them!

My second daughter lives in Switzerland... Time to pay a visit 😅

I would keep the Arturia MkII, as the action and controls are pretty good, and you keep a second keyboard which can be useful as B3 manual or just for another instrument

@JoJoB3 are you OK?. Why do you keep doing this (thumbs down here and there)?. Sincerely curious, don't see the point

Bert can make an 80s low end Casiotone sound like a top-notch workstation, that is not fair 😅

I own all four Refaces, bought used, as new prices were IMO too steep and was more a curiosity than anything I could use regularly. All but the CS were bought in working condition. The CS was just 100€ because it didn't boot up... A firmware install fixed it 🥳 Well, I think there won't be an update to that series. They were an interesting concept, but somewhat flawed. For me the CS is a good tool to learn basic synth concepts. As a performance synth I don't see it. The SoundMondo thing is also interesting, but seems underutilized. I have found good sounds there for the series. All in all, I guess Yamaha is just discounting an "old" product, not making space to a new version. But time will tell!

Some background: due to my work, I am about 8 hours a day on my electronics lab at home, were I have setup a monitor in the middle of the workbench, recessed so I can place the item I am working on in front of it (the bench is 1.2m depth). This lets me see the technical documents (schematic, PCB component locations, data sheets...) on it. But once the problem has been located, while I do the mechanical work, I can watch (well, sometimes mostly listen) any interesting YT video. During last years I have watched some thousands of mainly music related videos that way. So, for me, a good ad blocker is a must. The problem you describe at the beginning of the videos happened for some time, but lately (perhaps a year or so) is gone. At least with Firefox plus uBlock Origin (uBO) There was some fighting between ad blockers (uBO was very active on this) and YT during several months, as YT detected them and advised you could lost access to their videos, slowed loading and such. But the blockers modified almost instantly the code to prevent detection. After some months, YT has recently stopped doing that. Let's see what is next!

You can use uBlock Origin extension in your browser and forget those pesky ads in YT 😬

Just another synth project on the repair bench! (details on the Repair sub-forum) M-Audio Venom

Those original SD cards seem to be very prone to fail. Maybe is related with the battery getting depleted and, at certain voltages, causing havoc to them

Well, note that the image is zoomed. And also, if you look in same detail to the big ICs soldering, the quality is not very good. I would think that chinese PCB manufacturer is not that great (as, as you can imagine, this unit is Made in China) All in all, the synth seems good enough to be fixed. Let's see what happens when the +/- analog supply voltages are back! 😁

I can relate to that 😬