A Sample Of My True Power

This is a Roland S-760, a sampler. We've previously discussed ROMplers like my Roland XV-5050, and this sampler is almost the same as that, except for the part where it doesn't come with any ROM samples. Instead, you load samples onto it either by recording them in from another instrument, or copying them onto the internal storage.

And by "internal storage" I mean external storage, because this thing only comes with a floppy drive and a SCSI port on the back. I've got a BlueSCSI on the way to handle the latter, but while I'm waiting for that I need to at least boot this thing up and check it out, which means I need a boot floppy.

But we don't do floppies around here, so let's get something more modern in that drive bay.

This is a Gotek, a floppy drive emulator. It's pretty much the defacto standard for replacing these old floppy drives, and it functions by storing floppy images on a USB thumb drive that you shove into the front. The problem with them is that the default firmware kind of sucks, so pretty much everyone loads FlashFloppy onto them instead.

But first, why are there two of them?

For reasons. These reasons have to do with these extra ports on the back of one of the units.

Make a mental note, we'll be getting back to this in a future blog post.

Anyway, if I'm gonna install this Gotek I'll need to dig in and scoop out the old floppy, so let's get inside.

And we've got a friendly message from the Roland engineers.

Oh good, it's world standard. Here I was worried it was only standard in Japan and perhaps East Asia.

Hmm, what are these boards at the back?

No, no, we're not getting distracted. Focus!

Removing the floppy drive is about as straightforward as it gets. Just two screws on each side and it's out.

The two brackets on the bottom get transferred over. The Gotek even includes self-tapping plastic screws, which is nice.

You know, I'm just realizing something. These ports on the back are arranged a bit differently.

I wonder if he power cable is gonna reach all the way over there to the four pins on the left?

That would appear to be a "no". But at least the floppy cable reaches with length to spare.

Well I guess I've got a side-project on my hands. Better knock out both at once while I'm at it.

Hmm that's interesting, this one is missing those extra boards... No, no, focus!

Look away if you're squeamish, things are gonna get a bit brutal.

We can rebuild it. Better, faster, and more importantly longer.

And I didn't even forget to put the heat-shrink on before soldering the final connections. Nice.

Rinse and repeat, and did I say the power cable was too short? I don't know why I would say that, it looks like it reaches just fine.

So it's time to crack open the thumb drive, which is packed in the most delightful frustration-free packaging imaginable.

I FEEL SO UNFRUSTRATED WITH THIS PACKAGING.

And I just need to plug it in and... oh wait right, I forgot the part about the default firmware sucking ass. Let's deal with that.

Usually one would do this using a USB A-to-A cable, which is a bit too much of a cursed device for me to willingly own, so we'll be doing this the slightly harder way, by connecting to the serial port hidden in this 9 pin header next to the power connector... which naturally doesn't come with header pins soldered in.

Skipping past the soldering montage, I can now jumper the device into DFU mode (which stands for Device Fucked Up Firmware Update) and run the flashing software on my wintendo, which definitely wasn't written in the same year this sampler was built and never updated since.

And done, it's running the FlashFloppy firmware. After copying the boot disk image over, easily downloaded from Roland's website (and renamed to 000.img so it's easy to find), things are looking promising.

Promising indeed.

And we're in like sin!

Now all I need to do is gently tweak the volume knob back straight and everything will be-

Well fuck.

At least the Goteks are installed, I guess.

And I suppose I have one more project on the todo list now.

Let's Set Things Straight

And by "things" I mean the knobs on my JX-305.

They're a little bit out of line, particularly the knob for sustain, which is quite noticeably bent towards the keys.

These knobs had clearly taken a bit of a hit at some point.

And they're also kind of filthy, so let's dig inside.

First, the back comes off.

Then the main PCB is unscrewed and moved out of the way.

Then after unscrewing a few brackets we merely lift the control panel free from the... Son of a-

Ok, power switch comes out next, I guess.

Then we can finally pull the front panel board out.

As we can see, the pots are definitely filthy, and they've definitely been bent out of line. Those little legs are supposed to sit flush against the PCB.

I wasn't initially sure if these had been soldered askew at the factory, but looking at the back side it's clear that the solder joint had, at some later point, been deformed by the pins being levered up.

So that explains things.

Also just looking at this picture it seems I failed to notice that the pins themselves need resoldering. Excuse me a moment.

So let's see, where were we... Ah yes, so, flipping the board over, it becomes pretty clear that the pots are out of their proper alignment.

And some of them have even been hit hard enough to start to fold back the tabs on the bottom.

But once those tabs are pushed back into place, and once all the pins are resoldered (ahem, all the pins), things are looking much more straight.

Thanks to these refreshed solder joints.

Which are so shiny that they're basically impossible to photograph. Oh well.

Shoving things back into the case, we can see that the pots are aligned with the front panel much better than before.

And with the knobs on, everything is looking pretty much perfect.

Or at least as close to perfect as I'm gonna get it.

A Polarizing Subject

So I recently picked up a Boss SE-70. This is not to be confused with the Boss SE-50 that I already purchased a little while ago, although put a bookmark in that, we'll get back to it in a moment.

The unit was sold "for parts or repair" due to a nonfunctional display. Turning it on, we can see that indeed it is nonfunctional.

I had assumed that the likely cause was that the battery had gone dead and the contrast settings had got messed up. Then, without the display to be able to navigate back to the contrast setting, well, you can see the problem. Or not see it, as the case may be.

As I suspected, I was able to find an angle where the text on the screen was just barely visible.

However, navigating to the contrast settings and changing the value, while it did affect the contrast somewhat, did not fix the display. It just went from almost blank to entirely blank. I did some diagnosis and found that all the signaling, including the contrast voltage, were correct, so it was in fact a dead display.

It does have a nice bright backlight, though, so it's got that going for it. What doesn't have a nice bright backlight is my SE-50.

Switching the SE-50 on reveals a screen with a very sharp, high contrast display, but a pitifully dim backlight that's barely brighter than when it's completely turned off.

This of course means that I have one display with a good backlight, and one display with a good LCD panel. I think we both know where this is going.

While the newer display in the SE-70 has a clone chip, the one from the SE-50 has an original Hitachi HD44780 LCD controller.

Which isn't really relevant here, I just thought it was neat.

Anyway, to swap the backlight we first need to desolder the power leads.

It would be nice if the backlight would slide right out, but it's still stuck under the metal bezel. We'll need to twist the tabs on the backside and lift it off. Note that it also holds the LCD panel itself to the zebra strips, though after a while they tend to become fully adhered to both the LCD and the PCB, so there's not too much danger of knocking them loose. If you do, though, just put them back in place and they'll work just fine.

We'll need to do the same disassembly on the SE-70's display to get the good backlight out.

It was at this point I noticed that the bezel on the SE-70 display was also in better shape than the SE-50's bezel, particularly regarding the part where it wasn't covered with the decayed gunk of what was once some black foam. Instead it was covered with actual black foam. So I took both the backlight and the bezel from this unit to combine into the final working unit.

And speaking of combining things, the backlight looks pretty good behind the SE-50's display. And with the bezel on and connected to the SE-70, things are looking mighty fine indeed!

And it still works on the SE-50 too.

The SE-70's display is definitely toast. It's vaguely possible that only the polarizer is destroyed, but a whole new display is only about $3 which is less than a sheet of polarizer film, so I'm just going to go that route.

Anyway, since I haven't played around with the SE-70 yet, I decided to put the frankendisplay into it until the new displays show up.

And I must say it looks mighty fine.

As for the old display, I was thinking of putting it in the SE-50 just to fill the hole in the front of the unit.

But the shorter cable from the SE-70 doesn't reach between the connector near the back of the SE-50 and the front panel where the display mounts.

So it's just gonna look a bit empty for a little while.

A small price to pay, just a temporary inconvenience.