Just got this unit from Ebay. It powers on but then nothing. It displays some crazy numbers (8.8.8. or a backward 9 and 5). The unit does not respond to the push of any of the buttons.
I opened it and it looks good. The battery looks pretty new.
Suggestions? Any good repair shops that accept units via mail? I don’t have a reputable synth repair near me that I know of (central North Carolina, USA).
Could be a number of things. A lot of the time electronic devices from the 80s and earlier need some restoration work like replacing failing electrolytic capacitors.
We have a list of service centers we know of. You’ll have to call around to see who can take it. Hope you can get it up and running soon, these are incredible synths!
https://syntaur.com/service_centers.html
I have a few of these. Every one that was not pulled from a working rig required that every socketed chip be removed, sockets and pins cleaned with deoxit and reinserted. I use a tiny dab of dielectric on every pin to keep corrosion at bay and make insertion/removal easier in the future.
Because I commonly recap every 70s/80s/early 90s synth that passes through my hands, I recapped one of my Matrixes. To my surprise all the power caps tested okay but I suspect that is not common. I suspect failing caps is part of the reason for the very common transformer buzzing on them. The snap in main filter caps are both tricky to extract as well as harder to source than most. You pretty much must have a very good solder vacuum to do it without damage. The voltage regulators are common and cheap and should be changed also.
My guess is that just reseating/cleaning the sockets and running the initialization routine will get you up and running and allow a deeper inspection of function. I would do this before anything else. This means all voice chips, ROM, static patch chip.
have you tried the factory reset?
Thanks for the suggestion!
I did to no avail. The buttons do nothing.
Synthchaser.com may be your last hope.
That looks like a great resource. Thank you!