i hereby announce that there is another working 707 on this planet.

i successfully repaired the defective one i recently got off ebay.
repairs included cleaning the PCBs from some gooey residue (beer,
cola, whatever), replacing IC1 (7805) and R49 (strange resistor...),
replacing 2 volume sliders, replacing a couple of capacitors that
looked quite suspect to me, and general cleaning of the unit.
the LCD gave me some headache, it wouldnt want to turn on. only after
fully disassembling and cleaning of both the LCDs PCB and the rubber
bars which make contact with the display itself the thing would work
again.
i noticed that (for some reason only the roland corp. will understand)
the legend for the connecion cable for the LCD is reversed: pin 1
connects to pin 13 on the voiceboard we īll never find out who was
the genius behind that.

so, i īll move on to the fun part now: modding the beast. there are
some instructions and ideas on the web, and i already tried shorting
some pins on IC34 - great noises in there!
i dont think that i will harm the machine by drilling lots of awfull
holes in the case - a nice and clean extra box to put the mods in is
more appealing to me.

did someone succeed in isolating the trigger pulses for the individual
instruments yet right now it is just an idea, but it should be
possible to build analogue sound circuitry a la 808 (see
http://xlargex.xl.funpic.de/ for an excellent 808 clone) and use the
707 with them.
i shall investigate.... one of the next days. right now i am about to
play a little with my new friend... time to get out the stompboxes! i
love individual outs....

bleep, creekree