Red and Sticky

So recently I came upon a fantastic find, a Roland D-50 listed for sale at an absolute bargain price with those four little words I love so much: For Parts or Repair!

Wait, wait; actually my bad, this is the Roland D-70, the much loathed and resented synthesizer that was based on a completely different line of synths, and only gained the D- prefix when Roland realized that people really loved the D-50 and decided that phoning in a follow-up would be a really great plan.

It was actually the bridge between the Roland U-20/U-220 (and can even take the same expansion cards) and the later JD-800 in terms of lineage, and other than a few notable faults (like an underpowered CPU that can bog down under high load leading to slower than usual ADSR envelopes and LFO modulations, and the sound structure where tones are shared between patches) it wasn't a terrible synth. It just wasn't a D-50, a crime for which it will never be forgiven.

Anyway, that's really neither here nor there. This one is mine now, and it needs some fixing, so click through the break to read more.

If I Had A Nickel For Every Time

I got a few new bits of gear added to the pile recently, and both were half-rack modules, both produced no sound, and both, curiously, suffered from a shorted aluminum electrolytic capacitor which is a very unusual failure mode.

First up, the Boss RRV-10 Reverb. This reverb unit has a delightfully crunchy 12 bit sound to the echo signal which makes it honestly kind of an amazing effect. But it won't do me any good if it's dead, so it needs some fixin'.

Next is the Yamaha FB-01, which is a 4-operator FM sound module. It's mostly notable for the SolBass preset, but it has some other nice sounds in it. Or, at least, it would have other nice sounds if it wasn't just spitting out nothing but hum and noise. So it gets some fixin' too.

You might be wondering why it looks like the FB-01 has a black hole on its surface. The reason is pretty simple: at some point someone decided that it needed to have a sticker, and then at some later point someone decided that it needed to not have a sticker. That latter person scrubbed pretty hard to get the sticker and its residue off, and left a bit of a ring in the paint.

I hit it with some car polish and got it looking a lot better.

The remaining ring is much less visible but still there, and I can't really fully get rid of it without polishing the whole case to a high shine, which would look kind of out-of-place, so I'm leaving it like this.

I did at least take off some grime while I was doing that polish.

So that's a nice bonus.