I just brought my SQ-80 out of an extended retirement. For a while it seemed to behave normally. However, last night while playing the piano patch it worked fine for a while and then suddenly started making this out of tune, distorted ring-modulator sound. I could hear the piano sound in there, it was just buried under all the other weirdness.
I did a factory reset, but that didn’t fix it. Any ideas what’s going on?
Can you try with the effects all turned off? Does this improve the sound?
I wasn’t aware there was a way to turn effects on or off, or even that the SQ-80 had independent effects that you could apply to sounds.
What buttons or button combinations would I use to turn effects off?
Thanks for the speedy reply!
I assume you mean the Ensoniq SQ-80 and have the manual for it but here it is anyway, http://www.buchty.net/ensoniq/files/manuals/SQ80.pdf … Here is the service manual https://www.synthxl.com/ensoniq-sq-80/ … try the SQ-80 test procedure and see if it thinks that something is up.
Thanks for the reply. I think a found a way to fix it, and a wack theory for what might have been wrong.
I reloaded the “Internals” bank from a floppy disk that I have. After the reload I played the piano sound for quite a while, without the glitch recurring.
My wack theory: that the factory sounds are loaded from some chip inside it, and the firmware on that chip has gotten corrupted. And I’m hoping that the factory sounds are stored on the two main EPROM chips, because I just bought replacements with the upgrade to v1.8. If my assumption is correct, that should give me a good load of the factory sounds,
I will check out the service manual and run the suggested test. Thanks!
Quite often, the EEPROM or RAM chips on older synths start to fail.
Your symptoms sound very much like that.
Definitely worth the effort of replacing the EEPROM and possibly RAM if that doesn’t work. Good luck!