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 but sadly not Burr Brown but the same chip used in the S-50 from 1986. 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.

Broken Encoder

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.

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.

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 and the drive, which is a complex job. So I did this as one exercise; new LCD back light and inverter, new switches & LED’s, new Gotek USB floppy emulation drive. I also upgraded the output capacitors as they were easy to get to.

New Encoders & Knobs

Faded LCD The contrast pot worked okay but a new back light was needed and worse still the inverter was whining loudly. There are really only two options; Replace the back light and the inverter or fit a new LED display that is a pain to fit and it leaves the perspex cover proud of the panel by 1-2mm (as I did in my S-760). The original inverter is no longer available s a spare, and new inverters are rare as well.

Switches & LED’s All 29 tactile switches were replaced along with the double sided tape that holds the plastic buttons in place, as some buttons were sagging below the front panel surface. I also replaced the LED’s as they were a little faded. There are 5 orange LED’s, one red and one red/green bipolar LED. Modern LED’s are much brighter than 30 years ago and the LED resistor is only 470R.

So some careful tests were needed outside the W-30 so I could fit LED’s that were not over bright. So I looked for normal diffused LED’s rather than super bright clear versions, with lower luminosity (mcd of 10 or lower). I located some Rohm LED’s with very similar part numbers (SLR-56VC rather than SLR-55VC), so I bought these. The START/STOP LED is a 3-pin bi-polar red/green LED and still available from Little Diode – albeit expensive.

Gotek Drive  I bought a black Gotek floppy drive emulator, and flashed it with HxC firmware. The W-30 has to come apart into many pieces to fit the new drive, so this was done as part of a single tear down of the W-30. A set of small USB drives were bought and loaded with the factory sample libraries and a few third party samples that I have found. The Gotek drive has the added OLED display as its visible when playing, and it shows the sample bank name.

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 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.

Initially I was planning on replacing the floppy drive with a SCSI2SD but 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 gone with an external SCSI2SD drive and 25-pin cable. There is no power to the SCSI connector, so I have added a connection to +5V on Pin 25 via a diode and poly-fuse (Littlefuse 1.1A 30VDC) to protect the W-30 power supply.

Sample Disks The 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.