The Specialists Speak

Debbie Poyser & Derek Johnson conclude their conversations with the engineers who service with a smile.

If you caught Part 1 of this two‑part feature in last month's Sound On Sound, you'll remember that we introduced you to four professional hi‑tech service engineers who each run their own manufacturer‑approved service centre — Mike Swain (Panic Music), Bill Wheeler (Central Sounds), David Croft (the Synthesiser Service Centre), and Cliff Whitehead (CIMPLE Solutions). This month, they pass on more fascinating facts and amusing anecdotes...

Vintage Values

You'd have to have been living in a hole in the ground for the past few years not to have noticed the revival of interest in analogue synths. Our specialists have certainly noticed it — they're faced with the often frustrating task of attempting to repair 20‑year old instruments, from defunct manufacturers, with spares as scarce as hens' teeth.

Vintage instruments are the source of some of the most difficult problems hi‑tech service centres are presented with. Mike Swain: "Some of the vintage synths can have absolutely terrible problems to fix. The worst ones are when you've got buss shorts on something like an old Prophet or Oberheim. They can really be dreadful — and all for the sake of maybe one capacitor, or one logic chip. The most difficult faults of all to diagnose are memory problems — the Akai S900s, that sort of thing. The earlier samplers can be absolute murder to diagnose."

Does any particular instrument turn up more than others?

"I suppose the most common ones are Prophets with power supply problems. Dead OSCars are quite common too. It's just bad design — old design. They just age, really. There's a lot of interest in OSCars, but they can be difficult. You get lots of failures, and you have to ask whether it's economic to repair them.

"At least the OSCar used a lot of standard parts, which is more than you can say for something like an old Sequential. Because of the rarity of the chips, it can be $300 for a chip — because there are none; none of the Curtis chips, at least. A pair of sample & hold chips costs $360 from the US, before we import them! Then there's shipping and import duty on top. If the owner loves the machine to death, then to them it's worth having it repaired, but from a purely financial point of view..."

Mike's clearly hinting that the owner of such a machine might be better off selling it for parts and buying a fully working one...

"That's right. And I think that's what this particular customer is going to do. What's sad is that he bought it not working. I think he got it at a fairly reasonable price, but it's a gamble. He's still got his sounds, because we were able to get it working monophonically, but it was two sample & hold devices, one in one area of the machine and one in another — and he needed both."

The spares situation for some synths is unlikely to improve, with some parts almost worth their weight in gold. Mike: "Machines like the ARP 2600 — $200 for a pot!"

"And $50 for a knob," adds Adam.

Mike: "With the improved sounds on the new generation of instruments, people are going to realise that they've got the sounds of the vintage synths, and all the extras as well. I suppose the end of '94, beginning of '95 was the peak time for vintage synths. Over the last six months, the number of older synths coming in has declined. So I think the new generation will eventually oust the vintage synths. They won't be worth repairing unless you really want to keep them going.

"If someone buys one of the older machines, they've got to be prepared for it to cost them a lot of money to keep it going. The people who have the spares know the value of them. A lot of the source of Wine Country's [US company specialising in Sequential parts] spares is machines that are not economical to repair. It all runs out. And where a lot of the spares were custom‑made for the machines, there's no chance at all."

The sad fact is that eventually these parts will run out. Mike agrees: "They will run out, yes. With the Curtis chips, On‑Chip Systems have run out of a lot of them. They'll make them — if you place an order for 10,000 pieces! But who's going to do that now? Nobody — because the market's not there for them."

It's amazing how inept some people are with a soldering iron. Sometimes you think they've been soldering with a poker!

Though manufacturers like Sequential and OSC are long gone, the makers of many of the vintage synths are still major players in the modern synth market. Surely parts are available from them for their own older machines? Not necessarily, as Mike reveals: "It depends on age. A lot of manufacturers now are not stocking spares after their statutory time. They're only obliged to keep parts for, I think, seven years. As time goes by, that will become more of a problem, where you have application‑specific devices; once the spares have run out, that's it."

Service specialists can try to accumulate their own stocks of spares which look like becoming endangered, but as Mike says: "It becomes a question of how much money you can afford to invest. I think at the last count we had something like 7500 individual spares items. You can't stock everything for every machine: it would be impossible. But you get a feel for what components fail on a regular basis in any one product, so what we tend to do, if we have to order a part in, is instead of ordering just one, we order two or three. You try and anticipate, so that you have the parts in stock."

David Croft knows the same problem from the inside, and upholds the 'never say die' motto of the service engineer: "We have quite a good stock of parts, and we've derived second sources or alternative parts we can use in many cases. Things are becoming old and extinct, but we do try to keep alternatives going, or adapt other parts. Design Labs also developed RAM cartridges for the DX7 and the Roland equipment, where the cartridges were no longer made. Our business is to maintain synths, and to supply whatever is needed to keep them going. We do keep an eye on alternatives for parts that can't be supplied by the original makers."

Cliff Whitehead also does his best to find ways around spares shortages: "We keep a fair few stocks ourselves. The regular items, obviously we keep all that in stock, but older gear... Roland, for example, don't stock anything older than five years. They'll still keep stocks until they run out, but they don't make them any more. For example, you can't get SH101 benders or sliders any more, but we can actually get all the chips... Even the VCO, a CEM chip, is still available in the States — it costs £30, but it's available. Although you can't buy a processor chip programmed up from Roland, it's actually a Zilog 8031 microprocessor with a masked programmable ROM on the chip itself, which Roland had made up. With our programmer at the office, you can take a good, working 8031 with the right program on it, read it into the programmer and blow an 8051, which is more or less the same chip."

Panhandlers And Potboilers

Even when they're not causing spares headaches, vintage synths still cause other kinds of problems. David Croft: "I've got one on the bench at the moment. It's a Yamaha CS80 and someone has twiddled all the pots inside. It's not like having a failure that you can trace. The CS80 is a great big old thing, with about 500 pots inside which can be adjusted, and someone has adjusted just some of them. I'm having to go through and re‑align the whole thing, because there's no way of knowing what they've adjusted. It's going to take me a couple of days at this rate, maybe three days. It's a marathon task."

Given this current nightmare job, it would be understandable if David would like to give the CS80 a decent burial, then dance on its grave. But he's happy to see people turning again to what was deeply unfashionable just a few years ago: "It's good that people should have thought to go back to something different. I'm a bit sceptical about how it seems to be a fashion. Analogue has certainly got some good and different sounds to offer, but I think it's good to have several ways of making sound, whether it's sampling, FM synthesis, or whatever. It's good that people will now make sounds with whatever they happen to have at the time. I remember doing a track with someone, and we didn't have a bass drum, so we made one by thumping a speaker and connecting it to a microphone input. You shouldn't need to pay a fortune to get 32‑bit sampling or whatever — why not make a virtue of your limitations?"

Cliff Whitehead also admits to a certain affection for older equipment: "I like old gear, due to the fact that it is basic electronics, which is what I cut my teeth on. I've retrained in programming and servicing the newer, digital machines, but I do prefer the analogue stuff. It's more of a challenge than anything."

Second Time Around

Knowing what they do about older equipment, our service specialists are in a good position to advise potential buyers on the second‑hand market. We couldn't resist picking their brains for some inside information. Bill Wheeler's advice is pragmatic, like the man himself: "Get it as cheap as you can. If it goes wrong and you've paid £5000 for it, tough luck. Where do you stand in a court of law?"

Good advice. But what if you think the machine you've got your eye on has a trivial fault, a synth with a misfiring key, for instance, and you're tempted to run the risk and buy it anyway? Surely something that small couldn't cost too much to fix? Bill continues: "Speaking from the user's point of view, that's a major fault, and a major fault is money. Speaking as a service person, that problem is generally easy to repair and should cause no undue grief. It's when notes start missing in patterns of eight, for example, or specific patterns up the keyboard, that's when there may be serious faults, keyboard scanning faults in the actual electronics." And depending on the synth, even a single misfiring key might be more of a problem than it seems. David Croft: "I've just been sent a PolyMoog, which has odd and apparently misfiring keys. Now that's not just due to dirty contacts; each key has a separate electronics card, and if it's a problem with the cards, that certainly won't be trivial. Misfiring keys on some keyboards are relatively straightforward to fix, but not on all. Even with the modern ones, it's simple, but not necessarily cheap."

David sounds a further note of caution: "Try out everything thoroughly. Maybe even see if they'll agree, say, to let you have your money back in seven days, if you find a problem, or for them to get it fixed. You can't just try things out on the spot and expect to find a fault. Even we can work on instruments and not necessarily find a fault that might have been obvious to someone. If a vendor has nothing to hide and it is a sound piece of equipment, they shouldn't have too much to lose from such an agreement. If you do find a fault, you could arrange that you'll take it for repair and work out the difference on the purchase price. People often do that — they bring them here and then work out the final cost with the vendor."

With the improved sounds on the new generation of instruments, people are going to realise that they've got the sounds of the vintage synths, and all the extras as well.

Cliff Whitehead is happy to pass on a few tips: "If you're buying a sampler with a big display, and you see that the screen's not very bright, you might want to consider replacing the backlight at some stage. The backlights are about £40 plus VAT, plus labour, so you might want to knock off a bit of money for that. Watch software versions as well, especially in samplers — updates can cost money. Check that the key action is OK on keyboards. A good one for Roland keyboards is to just put your eye along the end of the keyboard, look straight across the actual keyboard, and see if any of the keys is lower than the rest. That'll tell you whether the springs have had a good hammering or not. Replacing the springs is simple, but you've got to strip down the whole keyboard. It's labour‑intensive."

It's Mike Swain that offers the real collection of second‑hand horror stories, along with one or two things to watch out for; first: "Removed serial numbers! And if it's been visibly modified in any way, if it's well‑worn, if it's been hammered and there are signs of tremendous wear on keys, that sort of thing. Missing screws will tell you if someone has taken the thing apart. I remember one instance where a guy bought a DAT machine, on spec through the mail, from an ad in a paper. He got it open at home, and it didn't work at all. He tried to contact the person who sold it to him — no reply. So he sent it to us to look at, we opened it up, and there were chips missing, boards burnt, tracks missing — unbelievable inside. It had been absolutely butchered. Somebody had tried to repair it, and tried to remove surface‑mount components — with a hot poker, I think!"

Adam remembers another example: "There was another one, a big 2‑inch 24‑track..."

Mike: "Yes, the buyer didn't really check it out. He bought a whole studio package, paid quite a lot of money, and the machine was in diabolical condition. They're nice machines when they're working, but it actually took us three weeks to get the thing done — there was that amount of work involved. The modules plug into a back plane, and all the back plane was broken. Somebody had rammed a screwdriver into the head, so that one track had a great big screwdriver gouge... the machine was mechanically and electronically falling apart, and we restored it. It was time‑consuming and fairly expensive. He didn't have a new head, so he's using it as a 23‑track, basically. You've got to be very careful what you buy."

If you're still game, though, here are a few words of advice from Mike: "You need to be sure that the thing is in working order. If you do buy something that's not working, you need to take advice on what that problem is likely to cost to fix, and make your offer in relation to that. We do inspect second‑hand items for customers. If you're buying a big multitrack open‑reel tape machine, it's very difficult, if you're a first time buyer, to know what you're buying. We'll have the machine in and check it out, and if the seller is legitimate, they don't mind. We'll give it the once‑over and produce a report on what we find wrong."

The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly

When you're in this kind of work, you soon come to realise that all gear is not created equal, and it's inevitable that some instruments will be easier and more pleasant to work with than others. We asked our service experts if they have any favourite designs — or any pet hates. David Croft: "I like the Prophet 5 and the way it was laid out. That's a favourite. Sequential were one of the main instigators of MIDI, and it's unfortunate that a company that had so much influence, perhaps as a consequence of their openness should have almost sacrificed themselves for MIDI. The company had the innovation to induce the other companies to follow a standard. Without them, it's quite possible that we wouldn't have MIDI as a standard."

On the other hand... "The synthesizers that people make as kits are awful to work on. They might have been a good idea, but you've got to contend with all the poor assembly problems. It's amazing how inept some people are with a soldering iron: boards come in with tracks pulled up and great big blobs of solder. Sometimes you think they've been soldering with a poker!"

For Mike Swain, a personal favourite is "the new series of Akai samplers, the 3000 series, and the DR8s — they're particularly nice." Adam also has a soft spot for Tascam tape machines, especially the TSR series. Mike agrees: "They are beautifully made; the engineering is wonderful. Something like that is a pleasure to work on. Tascam engineering, particularly on the big open‑reel machines, is beautiful. Compare that to some of the vintage synths, which are diabolical, particularly things like Memorymoogs, which are horrible to work on, because they're all just ribbon cables everywhere. You open it up and it's just a rat's nest of cables and boards. That was made when Bob Moog wasn't in control. It's a machine which shouldn't have been manufactured, in my opinion — it's unreliable, appalling construction..." Say what you mean, Mike!

Bill Wheeler confesses a weakness for "anything Roland", but isn't quite so taken with "some of the smaller, cheaper cassette 4‑tracks — because you have to take them to bits, then put them back together again completely, before you can try them. They're not service‑friendly."

For Cliff Whitehead, it's some of the ultra‑budget Cheetah instruments which cause headaches: "I don't see a lot of their instruments, but what we do get is difficult to fix. I've had a Cheetah 7P master keyboard in for a few months; I think the problem with that is the circuit board. The build quality of the circuit boards is such that if you're not very delicate with your soldering, you could damage a track. The tracks are very thin, and a slight flex of the board could put a hairline crack in some of them."

Long May They Service

Now that you've read these behind‑the‑scenes stories from the service industry, perhaps you'll think twice before rubbing your axe‑wielding girlfriend up the wrong way, giving your infant guinea pig the run of your studio, or taking your prize instrument on holiday with you in a Kwik‑Save carrier bag. But if something dreadful does happen to your gear, don't panic: these noble chaps (and the others like them who we weren't able to speak to) really can save your bacon, as well as keeping your studio in top condition.

Mike Swain speaks for all our interviewees: "Everybody is trying to do their job, they're trying to make sure that the customer gets a good deal. You're trying, actually, to keep people working, because a lot of the people that we repair for are professional musicians, so you've got to keep their equipment going — it's as simple as that. You've got to be there when the people need you."

Our thanks to David Croft, Mike and Adam Swain, Bill Wheeler, Cliff Whitehead and their staff, for their help and co‑operation in the preparation of this feature.

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