Roland W-30 Refurb

Roland W-30 As Bought

Overview I bought a used Roland W-30 in September 2019 with a faded LCD and broken encoder/missing knob for a low price of £100, and it came with 40 DS/DD diskettes with various sample banks and the original manual. The W-30 was exactly 30 years old, made in September 1989, by which time Roland had already sold 2000.

It is a typical example of a well loved and highly used W-30 in the UK. The exterior and electronics are in good condition but its shows signs of lots of usage! The work needed is relatively easy and cheap and will bring the W-30 back to original condition along with some nice upgrades.

The W-30 was introduced in early 1989 at £1599 in the UK and is the 12-bit S-330 reworked as a keyboard with a full MC-500 style sequencer and SCSI as an option, the TVF and TVA from the S-550 were included but sadly no effects section. The DAC is 16-bit is not Burr Brown but the same chip used in the S-50 from 1986.

Broken Encoders

The W-30 work station sold very well for the next 3 years with 10,000 units manufactured. A large 240 x 64 LCD replaces the video monitor, so programming is bit tight on screen space but the OS is familiar and easy to use.

I plan to use the W-30 for ambient music and sampled dialogue, a S-50 with resonant filters and SCSI, rather than as a Techno Prodigy creator. The use of 10 or more short samples is the typical home for the W-30, creating a sample workstation.

New Encoders

Initial Power On Before any repair work started I switched the sampler on, and it booted the OS and sample disks fine, but was hard to use in its current state! The front panel switches were very worn out and didn’t make contact, and I could hardly see the LED’s. All the keys worked fine which is unusual for a 30 year Roland key bed, so key contact replacement is one job that is not needed.

New Encoders I replaced both encoders with new ALPS versions and black metal encoder knobs. The knobs are a bit higher than the originals, but I mounted them as far down as possible. The limitation is the need to tighten the knobs onto the encoder with a hex key. They work well and look the part.

Some care is needed to get the new encoders exactly in the middle of the old holes as the shaft diameter is smaller. The wiring changes are explained on a installation guide that comes with the encoders and only the output board needs removing to do this job.

Inside

Full Tear Down The next set of upgrades and repairs needs the whole casing and all the PCB’s unscrewing, as we need to get to the front panel PCB, which is a complex job. So I did this as one exercise; new LED back light, new switches & SCSI upgrade.

New Display The contrast pot did its job but the EL back light was completely gone and worse still the inverter was whining loudly. There are two options; Replace the back light EL strip and the inverter or fit a new LED display that is a pain to fit but provides a nicer display and provides a long term solution. The LED display I used is not thicker than the original, which means the display bezel is flush to the panel.

I went with a new ERM24064DNS-1 (240 x 64) LED display with white lettering on black background from BuyDisplay here. This is pin compatible but needs some minor modifications to work correctly (detailed documentation is here). There are two cables to the display; CN12 which is a 20-way ribbon cable with a Hirose connector at one end and CN10 which is a 3-way cable for powering the EL backlight or LED. I patched the original LCD cable into a 20 pin DIL cable that attaches to the LED display, as making 18 new Hirose connections is very tricky.

• Patch a new 20-way IDC cable into the original, retaining the Hirose connector, red stripe is Pin 1.
• I used an ISC plu and socket to connection the two cables.
• Connect Pin 1 of the LED to frame ground using the black cable that is wired to the old LCD
• Remove Pins 21 and 22 on the LED header so its clear where the 20 pin connector goes.
• It is very difficult to remove the inverter transformer at T1, so leave it in.
• Remove C26, C27, C28 and Q1 from the main PCB.
• Connect a 100R resistor between +5V on the C26 + terminal and T1 pin 4.
• Reuse the CN10 cable and connect +5V to A and GND to K on the back of the LED.
• The original contrast adjustment onto Pin 4 remains the same.

The 100R resistor limits the current to the LED, as the correct brightness is at 120 – 160 mA.

Bezel Removal The LCD is glued with double side tape to the display bezel and its hard to remove and must be done carefully. I removed the old LCD from the metal frame by straightening the tags and letting the LCD come away from the frame. The next stage is to carefully heat up the glue with a hot air gun or hair dryer, then using a plastic prise tool separate the bezel and panel. DO NOT use any metal instruments as this will scratch the bezel. The bezel should be attached to the new LED display with double side tape once the diaply is in the W-30 to ensure the correct alignment, its the last job to be done but it takes ages to get all the glue removed,

Switches & LED’s All 29 tactile switches were replaced, and I checked the double sided tape that holds the plastic buttons in place, as some buttons were sagging below the front panel surface. It looks like the plastic hinge in the button has weakened with age. I decided not to replace the LED’s even though they are a bit dim.

SCSI2SD Drive

SCSI Connection The W-30 has all the connections for external SCSI and just needs a MB89532A 40-pin chip and OS 1.07. Roland sold the W-30 without SCSI (except in Japan where there was a W-30SC) and charged a fortune for the chip to be fitted. You can buy these together as a kit on eBay but I ordered my chip from UTSource for £2.50 as part of my regular orders. The chip was carefully inserted once I had the W-30 apart, and OS 1.07 was downloaded and a boot diskette created. The upgrade worked first time and SCSI drives could be formatted.

Initially I was planning on replacing the floppy drive with a Gotek version to provide easy access to sample banks, but with SCSI working I have gone with a SCSI2SD drive. The W-30 has to have a floppy drive connected or it wont boot, even though it will then go onto boot from a SCSI device. There is not much additional space inside the W-30, so I have fitted an external SCSI2SD 5.5 drive directly into the SCSI connector, no cable needed! There is no power to the W-30 SCSI connector on pin 25, so the drive is powered from USB and shares a dedicated USB power supply along with my Boutiques.

The SCSI2SD has been portioned into 4x 80 MB drives (the maximum possible) with SCSI ID 1-3 used for the factory libraries which can be found here, abs SCSI ID 0 being my favourite samples. I converted the hard disks to W format (takes ages) but found SCSI ID 1 would go unformatted every so often. So I will try a different SD card. I also copied the system disk to the hard drives so the W-30 will boot from the SCSI, which is much faster than floppy.

Sample Disks My W-30 came with around 40 sample disks in good condition, some of them from the Roland factory but others are from MusicMark in the USA (details here) and a company called Streetwise. There are 10 bright green Music Mark disks, all of synthesizers available around 1992, from Juno 106 to Korg M1. One or two nice samples but not very well looped and 8+ banks so each sample is usually less than 2 seconds. The 12 Streetwise disks were similar in quality, samples of synthesizers both analog and digital from the early 1990’s. There was also a CD with further sample disks from unknown sources. I have copied these onto my hard drive ID 0.

The Roland W-30 was commissioned into the studio on 10th April 2020.