Technology Transplant Roland TR-606 PCB Replacement

Click here for Technology Transplant's Roland TR-606 PCB Replacement page. According to the site:

"On inspection. It is important to note a crucial budgetary decision made during original manufacture of the TB-303 and TR-606 for cost effectiveness.
They are made of wood-pulp material. Not of glass fibers as the new PCB you have received. The wood-pulp material, is a very inexpensive PCB that is not intended to have materials removed afterwards. This type of PCB is actually only intended for prototyping purposes. Not commercial manufacture. An unfortunate problem for these machines that has lead to the demise of thousands."

If you track back to the root of the site, you will see list of vintage synth replacement parts, however no links.

Update via Peter Grenader of Plan b in the comments:
"Actually, the original comment was correct, at least in the Tech Transplant keyboard I installed for a customer (which took me a long time to get working for reasons I will go into next) and from the looks of it, the photo posted here - these boards are made from FR3 laminate, which is paper based. It's much less expensive than FR4, which is phenolic resin. That's the upside, one which in most cases is actually passed to the consumer.

The downside - paper-based laminates are much more absorbent than FR4. Not wanting to go into a long explanation (google ' PCB outgassing'), FR3 is basically a sponge. The air moisture which is drawn into the material is held there and drawn to and out the walles of the holes once heat is applied in the soldering process, which escapes as you attempt to make a solid solder joint. ON a double sided board it'smuch less of a problem as the palting acts as a barrier (in most cases,not always). On single-sided boards with no plating in the hole, there a straight excape path. Problem is, air and escaping steam can't take the same space and voids occur in the solder joint. If you're lucky, the outgassing will be bad enough that you can actually see the escape path - the hole on top of the solder joint. These you can repair. The ones that cause the problem are the solder joints that look normal to the eye, that are actually hollow inside. It greatly compromises the integrity of the solder connection. FR3 is reliability risk.

THe asorbtion is so great that is soaks up mouisture form the air - a big problem with boards made in tempid environments such as Asia. It'scommon practice to actually bake stored FR3 boards at low temporature prior to assembly. This draws the water out and what we ended up having to do at both Tandon and Western Digital before banning the use of this laminate. I have a lot of experience with this, as I was the quality manager who issued the purge and ban.

In the TT keyboard I installed, there were over 20 bad solder joints. This assembly had not been tested. Further, they didn't pre-tin the wires coming off the board on either side, on the keyboard end or ones which were designed to be soldered onto the 303 main board. The net result of that was there were over 10 broken wires soldered to the keyboard. Long story short, if you buy one of these, do some careful inspection before you go through the misery of trying to install it. It's a pain to troubleshoot."

MOOG Rogue New In Box (and Out)

You bee the judge. Title link takes you to shots pulled via this auction.

Details:
"Here is a Rogue Moog new in box. New, as in never used, still in original box & packaging along with new manual, technical service manual & power plug. Serial no. 8799. I bought a number of Moogs new from the factory in the 80s, and left some of them in storage. Have finally accepted that i won't ever use some of them, am selling off the goods.

It has been sitting in a cool, controlled storage facility since purchase. This new Rogue, accompanied by original packaging, box, manual, technical service manual and power cord deserves a home with someone who will use and appreciate it.

As far as the sound, it's great. Classic Moog that blows current synths out of the water. They'll make your speakers move. If you want the best in analog sounds, it doesn't get better than classic Moog filtering like this. I have owned all the best Moogs and the Rogue sounds fantastic, far superior to today's analog emulations and not embarassed head-to-head with more famous Moogs. Easily midied to bring it into today's productions, using existing CV & Gate jacks on the back.

Here is some info on the Rogue:

The Rogue, a "Miniaturized, cost-cutting successor" to the Moog Prodigy, is a 2-VCO, monophonic synthesizer with a 2-1/2 octave, 32-note (F-C) keyboard. Both VCOs are tunable to three octaves by a common switch. In addition, VCO2 is tunable via a knob to anywhere between a half-step below to an octave above VCO1. There is also a single switch that selects the waveform for both VCOs. A three position switch syncs VCO2 to VCO1. It can be hard synced or contoured synced, where the amount that VCO2 is synced to VCO1 is controlled by the envelope generator. The mixer section allows both VCOs and the noise generator to be mixed together, with a slider controlling each level. The mixer can be pushed to overdrive (distort) the waveforms. The filter section features variable keyboard tracking controlled by a knob, and sliders for the cutoff frequency, emphasis (resonance), and envelope amount. It also has "the pitch and mod wheels up above the keyboard, not to the left of it, along with a fine tune knob and a glide (portamento) knob." The Rogue has a single envelope generator for attack and decay, that switches to activate the sustain mode. There is also a switch that selects how the envelope affects the VCA. It can be set for either contour, keyed, or bypass (which was a simple organ-style gate).
Item in original box/packaging will be double-boxed and surround by packing materials.

Any questions don't hesitate."

Question: why did he open the box? via Dave.

MOOG Murf Video on Gearwire

Title link takes you there.

Roland Super JD 990

via this auction


JD-800 in a rack. Anyone know if you can edit this with all sliders and knobs on the JD-800 and if so does it change all settings or just the parameter you are editing? It would be a bit annoying if it changed everything. I know the Juno-106 will change all parameters if you just edit one.

Differences between JD-800 and JD-990
*Wave ROM was expanded to 6MB (vs 4MB on JD-800) with 195 PCM waveforms (vs 108 on JD-800) and that includes some waveforms transferred from JV-80 probably to make them soundwise more compatible.
* Additional card slot to use a 8MB expansion boards from SR-JV series.
* The LFO section got additional waveforms: sine, trapezoid and chaos.
* Next addition is the osc sync function which lets you synchronize two oscillators, a feature found in many analog synthesizers.
* Then comes the FXM, which stands for Frequency Cross Modulation - again found in some analog synthesizer, for example in JX and Jupiter series (although a little bit different there). It has 8 positions (named colors) that actually control the frequency of the modulating signal, and a depth setting 0 - 100 that controls the amplitude of the modulating signal.
* Next feature is (again from analog synth era), the famous ring modulation, for creating all kind of metallic percussions and strange efx.
* This synth features 6 types of ''structures'' which among many other things let you stack two filters in series, for building complex filter textures.
* Outputs increased to 8 total.
* Polyphonic portamento.
* Tempo sync delay.
* For all above reasons, it was named the Super JD.

The Octopus Project - Music Is Happiness

YouTube via brokencircuit.

Some theremin action midway through the video.

tearing down the studio

flickr by RazielPanic.

title link takes you to more.

ti polar side view 1

flickr by actuel

Title link takes you to more.

Prototype CS80 Announced on Synapse Magazine

Title link takes you to an April 1977 article in Synapse Magazine that mentions a "prototype of a large complex polyphonic system, as yet unnamed, that will begin production this summer. It will list for around $6500." There is also mention of other products like the MOOG Polymoog, Steiner-Parker "Synthasystem," ARP, KORG and more. It's a great read if you like going back in time.

You can find the January 1979 review of the Yamaha CS80 in Synapse here.

You can find more issues of Synapse scanned on Cyndustries under the Goodies section.

EAR Performance System Updates

Via Peter on the Plan B list:

"The EAR Performance System has seen somechanges since it was originally delivered and we've made somechanges to te focus page on the EAR site accordingly. Go here for details.
It's now been fitted with all four Model 10's and a Heisenberg Generator. We have as well loaded some exclusive photos from the recent NIN tour rehearsals in Los Angeles.

enjoy,

- P"

Pictured: Model 14 and the mighty MIlton closeup. I like the green.

Oakley Modular Triple VCA Printed Circuit Boards in Stock

Via Tony on AH:

"Ceri at Oakley Modular tells me that the re-issue of the Oakley Triple VCA printed circuit boards are now in stock. More information at the usual spot.

Tony"