A World of Sound

My XV-5050, being a moderately modern ROMpler, contains quite a few samples of quite a few instruments.

But, you know, it could always use a few more. Perhaps a great deal more. Maybe a whole world of sounds?

The Roland ROMplers from this era take "SRX" expansion cards, which include a bunch more instrument samples, plus presets that arrange these samples into a set of tones to form a patch, including information about what effects to apply, what sort of envelope to use to shape the sound, and so on.

The XV-5050 in particular has two SRX slots, which you access by removing a cover from the top panel. You can even see the huge Roland DSP in the corner there whose leads had lifted off the solder pads, which I had to reflow to get this unit working again.

Anyway, the SRX cards themselves are basically just a carrier for a set of mask ROMs, which are the large chips you see here.

There's also a handful of passives, capacitors and resistors mostly, the connector, and two more ICs.

The smaller of these two chips is a TC7W34FU which is a triple non-inverting buffer chip. It's simply used to buffer the signals to the other IC, which is a 93LC46X EEPROM. The EEPROM is writeable from the main unit although I don't know if that functionality is used in the stock firmware. The entire EEPROM is only 128 bytes (1kbit), so it likely only contains some very basic identification and configuration information for the card, and not anything like the patch data.

Anyway, with that curiosity out of the way, let's stick it into the XV.

It's got this sort of twist-lock tab on one corner that's meant to keep it from falling out but it's honestly a bit of a pain to use. I got it in there, though, and that's what matters.

Well, what really matters is actually whether it works or not, so let's check that.

Yup, there we go. A whole world of sounds at my fingertips!