> From: conor.strachan@...
>
> I recapped and I am no longer getting freezes but I think I
> have finally isolated the actual problem, the synth is not
> freezing and is operating fine unless the audio cable is
> plugged into the either mono audio outs or phones jack, when
> I do this it will freeze pretty much straight away or after
> two or three seconds.
>
> The moment I put the audio cable in it freezes, signal is
> giving a buzz. I think I am shorting the whole synth when the
> audio cable is inserted. Now it looks like someone has
> previously done something funky to jacks. My phones jack had
> broken away from the chasis so I just took it off and will
> replace it. If anyone has any clues from looking at the
> wiring of what it could be thats shorting it out. There are a
> couple of resistors bridging on the mono outputs. The brown
> wire has tape around it and has been put out of use. The
> black ground is going to the headphones along with a yellow
> that is bridged across by a piece of metal.
>
> Was anyone aware of this mod? something might of gone wrong
> with mine..

The factory modified the design at some point. Originally, the brown wire was intended to be used as the ground on the headphone jack. They changed that, and ran a wire from the headphone jack ground back all the way back to the power supply. I've always found that that made the output really noisy. It works better to remove that wire (it looks like it's black in your pictures--mine were green), then pull the shrink tubing off the brown wire and use that to ground the headphones. The only downside is that if you use headphones at the same time you use the line output, you may get some clipping in the line output.

That said, I don't know how the current grounding scheme would cause your problem, or how the alternative would fix it, unless there's a missing or broken ground connection somewhere else. I would poke around with a meter, looking for voltages between various ground points. How much voltage do you see between the grounds on the headphone jack and the jack next to it? How about between some ground on the main board and a ground up on the panel boards?

--

Ciao, Paul D. DeRocco
Paul mailto:pderocco@...