Hi all. My first post so I’m diving in at the deep end
I’ve had a Roland D50 since about 1996/97
It’s been worknig perfectly for many years but I had a problem about 4 months ago and ended up replacing all of the tact switches and replced the battery (again) while i was at it. The D50 has been working perfeclty since then,
So far so good
But yesterday, I realised I wasn’t getting any sound from the audio outputs.
There is also nothing coming oyt of the headphone socket and finally, the Midi out doesn’t seem to be transmitting either.
It has never been gigged since I’ve owned it and has been a permanent fixture in my home studio
So, does anyone have any idea what coiuld be going on here?
I’m reasonably competent with a soldering iron but useless at reading circuit diagrams
Often when you have somewhat unrelated things not working (MIDI and audio) it indicates a problem with the power supply. If you search Roland D-50 Service Notes there is a page with the power supply schematic. The D50 has 5V, 12V and -12V power lines. You’ll want to verify your power supply is outputting the proper voltages with a voltmeter. It looks like there are test points labeled on the PCB so it should be easy to read those voltages. Just take care not to short anything with your voltmeter probes and also don’t handle the power supply while the synth is plugged into the wall; there are lethal voltages in there even with the device turned off.
Hi again Travis
This is getting a bit weird now
I switched the D50 on yesterday (actually it comes on automatically when I power up my studio) and to my surprise, the D50 was fully responsive across the length of the keyboard.
What isn’t working is the selection between Internal & Card. Whichever button is pressed, the same patch is displayed for both I & C.
I can change patches freely with the patch select buttons, meaning there are 64 patches available (8 x 8). I’m fairly sure the available patches are a mixture of Internal & Card which is even more bizarre
Now that is a very oddly specific problem! Sadly I’m not too familiar with the D50 in particular to offer much advice on that problem. Hopefully somebody else can chime in who knows more about these. If the internal battery hasn’t been replaced in a long time that can cause your internal patches to be lost but it shouldn’t cause this kind of behavior.
That’s ok Travis, you’ve been helpful so far
The bttery was replaced about 4 months ago when I replaced all the tact switches.
One thing I should have done yesterday was to see how it behaves without the expansion card inserted, so that will be my next task.
And I believe there’s an way during power up to initialize the D50 without doing a full factory reset, so I’ll have a hunt for that
OK, just an update on the D50
I have 2 expansion cards. One of them works fine and I can freely switch between internal and card. The other card will not let me select any patches whatsoever. No matter which patch I select, the display reads C-along with whatever internal patch was used before slecting Card. For example, if I’m using I-11 Fantasia, select the Card the display now reads C-11 Fantasia. Weird eh?
I thought it might be a faulty card so I managed to source a replacement on Ebay, but it exhibits exactly the same behaviour.
So, could the card reader itself be faulty?