Overview I bought an Oberheim DPX-1 in July 2020 with a failed power supply, which is very typical as the original contains a weak spot – the Rifa X2 capacitor across the mains inlet power which burns out rather spectacularly. I originally had two of these sample players back in the late 1990’s along with […]
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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 […]
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Overview I bought a used S-750 in May 2018 for £85, which is a bargain, especially as it has an expanded 18 MB of sample memory, and was from Air Studios. It was manufactured in February 1993 and is a fairly late model although it does have wire kludges to the main PCB. Whilst it […]
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Overview The Quick Disk drive in the early Roland samplers is prone to failure and long since obsolete. One of my background projects is to create an micro processor emulator, as I have 3 of these samplers. This post details progress to this goal. How the data is stored Each side of a QD contains […]
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I bought a broken S-50 Sampler in July 2019 for £50, so this was either going to be a bargain or a train wreck! The seller was local so I picked it up and traveled back by train over the Surrey Downs, reading the user and service manual along the way. The external condition was […]
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Introduction I fitted a new OLED display to my Roland S-10 sampler in February 2019, but the new display only shows the first 8 characters, as the original display is configured as 2×8 lines when it actually shows 1×16 lines. The new display is not a drop in replacement. This problem also affects the Roland […]
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In February 2018 I bought a Roland S-10 sampler for £50, which looked in reasonable condition on eBay but with the usual QD drive failure. My plan was to re-use the 4 octave keyboard in another project, as S10’s often have had a hard life! However once I had cleaned up the sampler at home, […]
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In October 2018 I bought a 31-year old Roland S-220 sampler for £70, with no photo of it working this was a bit of a risky purchase! Why buy one in the first place, given it only manages 4.4 seconds of sample time at 30 kHz and 12-bits? Even the disk drive is horribly unreliable […]
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Introduction I first bought an Emax rack sampler back in 1989 for £1200 and spent a lot of time making samples and trying to find the factory samples on diskette, which were really expensive in those days. In 1991 I visited the Emu Systems factory in California and tried to get a SCSI upgrade for […]
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