The Specialists Speak

Disaster strikes! Your most essential piece of gear dies on you mysteriously. What should you do? Take it to the professionals, of course. In the first of a two‑part feature, Debbie Poyser & Derek Johnson talk to some of the engineers who service with a smile — and find they have some amazing tales to relate from the inspection pit of the music industry.

The last thing you want to think about when you buy a new hi‑tech instrument or studio gadget is what you'll do if it stops working the day after the warranty period expires. But despite the increasing reliability of modern musical and recording equipment, things still go wrong, and even if you're lucky enough to get away with owning a breakdown‑free studio, certain items need a regular service to keep their performance up to scratch. This is where people like Mike Swain of Panic Music, Bill Wheeler of Central Sounds, David Croft of the Synthesiser Service Centre, CIMPLE Solutions' Cliff Whitehead, and Graham Bryant of Aspen Media come in.

Though Britain is a small place in terms of surface area, it's rather bigger as a 'service' area, with thousands of hi‑tech musicians, from amateurs right up to top professionals. These people take their ailing equipment to a surprisingly small number of hi‑tech service centres. Large retailers often have their own service facilities, and manufacturers with UK distribution and support operations naturally deal with much of their own repair and servicing. But the number of independent centres equipped and approved to deal with a wide range of hi‑tech music brands and problems is pretty small — perhaps because the right kind of expertise isn't easy to come by, and because these really are a special breed of people, willing to undertake the time‑consuming and often monotonous tasks involved for the satisfaction of eventually tracking down an elusive fault and bringing a dead instrument back to life.

We had a fascinating time talking to the heads of the above‑mentioned service centres about their day‑to‑day experiences as problem‑solvers and troubleshooters, and came out with renewed respect for their skill, perseverance, and humour.

Key Questions

If you're a regular reader of SOS, there's a good chance that you're a keyboard player, or at least own a keyboard. And there's a lot of you out there — almost all our service specialists revealed that the most common type of equipment they encounter is keyboards. If you're now wondering why service centres see so many synths (and are looking nervously at yours and asking yourself if it's about to blow up), let's find out if synths go wrong more often than other hi‑tech gear. Our specialists don't seem to think so. It simply seems to be a question of numbers — Mike Swain: "There's an awful lot of keyboards out there: a lot go into the home market, as well as the professional and semi‑professional market. There's a huge interest in making music, right throughout education."

So what tends to go wrong with them? Bill Wheeler: "Mechanical failure — misfiring notes are quite common, and things being tipped inside... beer, coffee, sea water..." David Croft maintains that "You get a whole range of problems, but I wouldn't like to say what's the most common. Misfiring keys seem to be more prevalent these days in keyboards that use rubber contacts. It seems that the rubber contacts age and perish, and it doesn't depend on whether you use them a lot, but purely how old they are. Fixing this kind of problem is theoretically straightforward — you replace the contact — but in practice there's quite a lot of work in just disassembling the machines these days: they're all crammed with layers of things to dismantle, whereas with older keyboards you just take the bottom off to get at the keys. It can take you at least an hour's work to get a keyboard carefully dismantled".

Cliff Whitehead agrees that apparently small faults can still be relatively expensive to repair: "Some customers bring us the keyboard and say 'my C key's gone', and they don't understand why it's going to cost £80 or £90. But when one key starts going, the rest are sure to follow. Key contacts are made up with about 12 or 13 in a set, and if you replace one, you replace 12 or 13 of them. And if you're replacing that many, there's only four or five contact strips across a whole keyboard, so you may as well replace the whole lot, once you're in there. Otherwise, the customer may be back in a couple of month's time replacing another one, with another 'X' amount of labour..."

Mike Swain also sees a lot of home keyboards and organs, which often come in with a different fault. "With home keyboards, it's power problems. The plugs of the little AC/DC adaptors protrude from the back of the machine; they get quite a bit of careless handling and the connector gets pushed through the back. So, the two main areas are keying problems, where Coke or something has been tipped over the keyboard, or broken DC jacks and smashed PCBs [Printed Circuit Boards]. With synths, you have the usual key contact problems and, again, beer on the keyboard, and so on. The worst one we had was from a holiday camp. A guy phoned up and said 'I've got a problem with my keyboard. Can you have a look at it?' Turns out he'd upset one of the punters, who had then urinated in his keyboard!"

'Liquid Ingress'

'Liquid ingress', as the cognoscenti call it, seems to be a more common problem than we had realised, and as revealed by Mike Swain's anecdote, the type of liquid isn't always what you'd expect. Bill Wheeler has seen his fair share of these cases too: "We've removed frogs, seaweed and spirogyra — green algae — from keyboards." You might well be wondering how that got in there. Bill is blunt: "A lot of the damage we see has been done by a woman — inflicted on her boyfriend's pride and joy. We've had combos with axes stuck in them, and keyboards and monitors thrown in the sea, which are found floating about and picked up by yachts. We've had candle wax poured into hard drives, and we've removed the wax to save people money. That was the worst. They must have had an altar candle, the amount of wax that was in there." Central's administrator Heather chips in with another amazing example: "We've had glue poured into the keyboard. A couple had fallen out, and she decided to get her own back..."

Even liquids less obviously destructive than glue can cause serious damage to delicate mechanisms, with rapid corrosion resulting from liquids such as Coke, orange juice and urine — of both the animal and human variety. The annoyed holiday camper's retaliation caused the unfortunate keyboard player mentioned by Mike Swain quite a lot of hassle. Mike: "He brought it to us the next day, and we had to take it outside and literally hose it out, and then disinfect it. It had already started to corrode the PCBs — uric acid is very corrosive if you don't catch it quickly enough. Coke is the worst. The acid in Coke does a wonderful job of etching through the key contacts."

Pets Mean Problems

It would seem that when it comes to instruments, Pets Mean Problems. David Croft: "People's pets misbehave — not toilet‑trained, or whatever. Guinea pigs, cats... The problems in these cases can be quite severe and can actually write off the instrument if it's left too long. Tracks corrode, but you can't see the corrosion, and you can't judge the area of damage." Mike Swain remembers a similar example: "It was a Sansui WSX1 multitrack. Our part‑time engineer opened the box and noted that it smelt a bit strange. Then he opened the unit up and there was this terrific stench of ammonia! We phoned this guy up and he said 'Well, yes, my cat did have a habit of sleeping on it, and it was incontinent...' That machine was actually a total write‑off".

If something similar befalls you, Bill Wheeler has some useful advice for minimising damage after liquid spillage, before taking the instrument to a service centre: "Unplug the keyboard immediately, tip it on its edge, slightly backwards, to let the liquid drain out, keeping it away from the mechanics of the keyboard. Don't leave it flat where it is and dive for a towel to wipe it off. That's the worst thing you can do. Tip off the surplus quickly, get it on its side and let it all drain off, avoiding the keyboard. From our experience of instruments suffering from an ingress of liquid, it's the common sense thing to do."

If, despite emergency first‑aid, liquid does affect your synth's keyboard contacts, it often means a repair job. Mike Swain: "You have to replace the [keyboard] PCB. A lot of the PCBs now are what we call 'flexis'. [Mike produces a long, slim, flexible PCB, from a synth which had had orange juice spilt over it]. Components are placed on top of these flexi strips, and the contact pads [pairs of small, raised ovals of a graphite material which connect with rubber key contacts when a key is pressed] are also on there. The tracking on these is conductive ink, and that can be etched off. So you have to replace this and the contact rubber."

Losing Contact

Mike showed us how the orange juice had partially removed a graphite contact pad. The only solution here was a whole new board, just because of the loss of one pad. And the cost of a new board? "About £20. Different manufacturers have slightly different boards, but this is the basic principle of modern contacts. And for synths with this keying method, it's the main area of failure."

Liquid isn't the only thing that can affect keyboard contacts. Mike shows us a strip of grey moulded rubber, with multiple pairs of black rubber contacts which connect with the graphite contact pads on the flexi PCB. "That's a contact rubber which goes underneath the keys. They use this method for detecting velocity, for velocity sensitivity. The two contacts are arranged in a pair, and you can see that one is higher than the other. That's the back contact, the one that starts the timing process. The microprocessor measures the time taken between that one contacting and the front one contacting. Then it says 'that's so many microseconds, and therefore the note should be played that loud'. But since the front one is the one that actually produces the note, if the back one becomes dirty, the note always plays at full volume, because the contact that helps the microprocessor decide how hard the note has been played isn't functioning. And if the front one becomes dirty, there will be no sound at all. The most common fault is that some notes play louder than others. And that happens throughout all manufacturers."

You might wonder whether any manufacturers are working to produce a different contact system. Mike's son and co‑worker Adam reassures: "They did change the design moderately. They used to have little vents in the top of the rubber contact strip, to expel the air when the keys are pressed. But they changed the design to stop all the muck from sucking through the vent and dropping onto the contact."

Mike: "When that rubber is sitting in place, it forms a seal, so these vents act like little air pumps. Originally, the contacts were top‑vented, so that the air was squashed out through the little holes on the top. Of course, when the air was sucked back in, it sucked all the dirt and everything through. So they changed the design, put the vents through the PCB, and a little filter strip along the back to stop most of the dust. This one's a top vent, and we still have to use those, otherwise it's an expensive repair — you have to change the PCB underneath. To change the contact style, you have to change the board completely."

All this means that if your synth has the old type of board, it'll have to have the old type of replacement rubber contact — unless you want to splash out on replacing a PCB which may be perfectly OK!

Modern Times

If you let your incontinent cat snuggle up on your multitrack, or balance your Kronenberg on your keyboard, you've got no‑one to blame but yourself when something goes wrong. But even if you handle your instrument with kid gloves, problems can occur. As we've already seen, manufacturers are keeping an eye on what tends to go wrong with their instruments and refining their designs continuously; do our specialists think that modern instruments are consequently more or less reliable than their vintage counterparts? You'll be pleased to hear that their replies are a resounding vote of confidence for the manufacturers. Mike Swain: "The more modern machines are more reliable, without any shadow of a doubt, because the component count is less. Also, with the new techniques that are used for producing devices like ASICs [Application Specific Integrated Circuits], the wafer fabrication is so much better than it was 20 years ago, so the chips themselves are much more reliable." Bill Wheeler agrees wholeheartedly: "They're far superior. Because there are less components. With an old synth, you have discrete components to do everything. A modern synth does everything an old analogue would do and more, on a small board. It's more reliable, although certainly not serviceable‑friendly." David Croft joins in the general chorus of approbation: "You have a vastly more complex system compared to what you used to, but I would say that they are much more reliable. Admittedly, we are inundated with repairs, but there are far more keyboards around than there were, say, 10 or 15 years ago. I'm sure we get a smaller proportion going wrong."

That seems pretty conclusive: modern synths are more reliable. But are they easier to repair and service? Replies to this one were more equivocal. David Croft: "I don't think you can really compare the two. One of the things that modern gear has, which I quite like, is surface‑mount chips. Before, the conventional devices were ICs with legs on a tenth of an inch pitch, which went through the holes in the board and were soldered in place. Now, the legs have a pitch half that, or less, and are actually soldered onto the surface of the board. Some of these devices now have at least 100 pins, and it is quite a specialist operation to get those on and off. With the conventional IC, there was actually quite a lot of work in de‑soldering every pin separately, carefully, and then detaching them. It meant that the board was prone to damage, especially if an engineer didn't have exactly the right tools.

"Now it's a different method of assembly, and I prefer it. We design with surface‑mount devices and you can fit a lot more into a smaller space. I'm happier to de‑solder and re‑solder those devices than I am with the earlier type. I think you also get a lot more for your money these days — things are far more integrated, and perhaps less over‑engineered than they may have been in the past. Things were made over‑strong. Some instruments now have a cheaper construction, and in some cases they're perhaps too cheap, and do break quite easily. But you get good equipment for the money you pay. You get a lot of technology."

Bill Wheeler also singles out modern surface‑mount technology for comment: it doesn't present any special problems for qualified engineers, but "the customer has to pick up the tab for the extra time that has to be spent in lifting off 100‑pin surface‑mount ICs. It's not that it can't be done — it just takes more time to do it, or at least to put it back on to check." Bill also concurs with David's comment about the build of modern synths — perhaps the pendulum has swung too far away from over‑engineering? "Comparing an old synthesizer with wooden end cheeks to a modern one that might have plastic end cheeks, the old synth would probably take a good smack on the side; the modern one would probably not. The move to plastic means less robust equipment, but it is cheaper and faster to produce — a plastic‑injected form is far cheaper to produce than a piece of wood that has to be tailored."

Component Quality

While there might be reservations about the outer construction of new synths compared to old ones, Cliff Whitehead has none about the quality of what's inside them: "On the pro products, the Akai and Emu stuff, it's all really well made. The circuit boards are really high quality. Where chips are put into IC sockets, there are several types available: the best are the turned‑pin DIL socket, which grip all four sides of the pins. All the Akai and Emu stuff uses these sockets."

Mike Swain has little hesitation in affirming that modern synths have many advantages as regards repair and servicing: "I suppose it is easier. Because the modern synth or keyboard is now using ASICs, the component count is less, so you can say that the fault is probably in one or two of the larger components. So from the diagnostic point of view, it can be easier — though not always, because you don't know what's going on inside some of the ASICs. It can be a bit of a black art, because the manufacturers don't tell you what happens inside each device. You know what sort of signals are coming out, but manufacturers are trying to protect their own proprietary designs, so nobody really divulges exactly what's going on in their chips. You have to just replace the chip. The component count is less, but it's more difficult to service, because you've got to remove these parts — if you have to change one of the larger chips, it can take you two hours to remove it and fit the new one. And remember that the cost of one of these ASICs can be £200‑300, and nine times out of ten when you remove one of the surface‑mount chips you damage it, because of the heat you have to use. So, you've got to be very sure that the one you're removing is the one with the problem. But yes, the more modern synth is in some respects easier to repair."

Our four professional engineers had so much to say that one article just wasn't enough, so tune in next month for the truth about vintage synths, some valuable inside information about buying second‑hand, plus lots more useful tips and behind‑the‑scenes stories..