The evolution: Poly Evolver upgraded encoder edition ambient soundtrack

video upload by MIDERA

"Last weekend I managed to replace every single encoder on my Poly Evolver. It has now evolved. It uses 24-detented encoders, which work much better than the originals. After 3 months of ownership my encoders that I applied deoxit to, needed it again. I wasn’t going to keep going with that so I bought the encoders and replaced them all.

Day 1: This took me 7 hours to complete. Not only did I take forever, I managed to ruin two pads in the process and panicked about it. I managed to repair the leads, thankfully, but it was a terrible experience, most of which happened within the first hour of work. I knew I still needed to do the rest of that board and the other two boards. This board was the right most board. It was also the hardest because of the 16 step sequencer section which had LEDs right next to the encoders.
Day 2: This took me 3 hours to complete. There were no issues.
Day 3: This took me 1.5 hours to complete. This was the left-most board. The problem with this board was that once I reinstalled it – a few of the encoders didn’t work. I panicked and took the board out and found all of the traces to be intact. I plugged it in again and they still didn’t work. It turns out these were the encoders that only worked when oscillators 3 and 4 were pressed. So obviously they didn’t work.
Was it worth the effort? I don’t know. I still feel like I have too many synths and this is just another one. It sounds really good, it does – but when you have so many, and have so many that sound so good, it is hard to justify everything I do have. It sounds so close to the Matrix 1000 – but yet, I find myself still believing that is one of my favorite sounding synths :/ And the lack of 6 voices makes the PE just a little underwhelming in that sense. But either way, I hope you enjoy my first noodling with it after the evolution."