My Waldorf XTk recently suffered from the dreaded knob breakdown. The original silo knobs are made of a soft rubber plastic that gets sticky and breaks down over time. I heard you can use baby powder or corn starch to get rid of the stickiness. I gave it a try and as you can see in the second image below, one of the knobs literally fell apart while rubbing them clean. BTW, I high recommend taking the knobs off the front panel before trying this for obvious reasons.
I decided to opt for the ALBS knobs used on later models of the Waldorf XT and Q. I actually have a blue Q Rack with ALBS knobs and love them. I heard there were group buys at Midibox.org, but unfortunately there wasn't one going on when I checked. I did some searching and found them available at Modular Addict for a good price. Unfortunately they were out of stock, so I contacted them and they placed an order for me along with some extra! You can find them here.
I ended up going with transparent red for the majority of knobs and transparent blue for the cutoff and wavetable knobs. I know it's a bit reverse, but I love the look of the red on orange. :)Note: If you get these knobs, note that they are notched. Make sure you align them correctly before placing them. On my XTk they are nice tight fit. At first they only went about 3/4 of the way in and I thought I was going to end up with a bit of a gap under each knob. I realized this was not normal until I got to the fifth or so knob which went all the way down. I pulled off the first knob and tried putting it back on and it went all the way down. The I did the same for any knob that didn't initially go all the way down on the first try and all was good. I wanted to be careful not to damage anything under the hood of course.
Below you'll find a few pics of my XTk minus the knobs followed with the new ALBS knobs installed. It's a beauty. :)
Big thanks to Modular Addict for ordering them for me! Once they were in, they shipped them out quick!
