BBrraaiinnss

So it's that time again.

This JX-305 came up for sale with those four sweet words "For Parts or Repair".

The seller indicated that the synth stopped working after they had played a gig on a boat, in which they were forced to leave the synth out in some misty rain because they didn't have anything to cover it with. I was quite confident that the rain had nothing to do with the failure, so I made a bid and it arrived on my bench.

When I powered the synth on, it was indeed dead as a doornail.

The display was blank, none of the LEDs were lit other than the Beat light which was glowing orange (it's only ever supposed to be red or green in normal operation), and basically everything was unresponsive. Not a positive first step.

However, much like the MC-505, which this synth is based on, the CPU has a hard-coded bootloader that you can access by holding down the right keys when powering it on.

The magic combination is to hold down "Mute Ctrl" while powering the synth on, and then tap on "3/High Hat" a few seconds later.

Well that's looking better already. Let's see how far we can get with this.

Well, it's taking data, and...

Hmm, nope, no good. Well, that explains why the main processor isn't booting: if it can't write a firmware image it sure isn't going to be able to read it back either.

Having a peek inside, we can see some big flat-pack chips soldered down with our good friend lead-free solder.

This one in particular is the flash chip that holds the firmware, and I think it needs a little love. So, come along for the adventure and see where it takes me!

I promise it'll be fun. Or, well, it was for me at least.