#dx7iid

Yeah six weeks late eh? Whatever. I was busy. Oh and that’s an actual New Years Card I sent to a pal from way back who lives here in Japan not so far away. As opposed to Xmas Cards, New Years Cards (nengajō) are commonplace (more like hyperfuckingallovertheplace) here. Anyway. I wonder if any postal workers even noticed. Hmmmm.

SO I have this small humidifier I use during the winter here, cheap deal, with an RGB LED in the base that you can set to one of like ten colors, or it can set to cycle through the colors either smoothly transitioning or suddenly jumping from one color to the next. Winters are REALLY dry here, so a small humidifier is almost a must-have item, especially for people like me who grew up in sub-tropical climates. I wanted to use this adapter to test out a power supply I built for a project I’m working on that has three power lines (12v, 9v and 5v) supplied by three regulators. As you can see in the above photo, the Input is for AC 100V 50/60Hz, which is the standard in Japan. the Output says DC 24VC 650mA. SAYS. It was fucking AC!!! I was scratching my goddam head for about ten minutes trying to figure out what the flying hell was going on, and then when I hooked it up to my multimeter, set the thing to test DC Voltage, the display showed numbers that were cycling. Are you fucking shitting me? Switch it to read AC and guess what? Solid 24V. The bottom line there on the sticker says Rated output: 12VA. Huh? I generally don’t trust shit made in china for a variety of reasons, from personal experiences with quick-to-fail or dead-from-the-factory products, to questionable ethical and environmental practices both at the factories themselves and by the companies that choose to base production in those factories (ESPECIALLY companies that should damn well know better and still be making shit in their own home countries providing jobs to their own citizens). This is my major beef with behringer. TONS of hype about the new clones they’re releasing. Yay! Finally the average Joe can afford a real analog synth or two or three! Whoopee! No need to shell out the ridiculous big bucks people are trying to sell the classic machines for anymore! There are some people out there whose musical work I really respect, who (unfortunately, to me) are sucking the behringer schlong so hardcore deep-throat style they probably shit Uli spunk. Maybe that’s a harsh thing to say, but people, do you NOT have experience nor memory of the “quality” of behringer products over the past two freaking decades? Ethical business practice is something Uli has obviously never heard of, I mean first it was blatant copies of Mackie mixers, now copies, oh no sorry, ‘clones’ or ‘tributes’ or whatever PC-ish terminology they wanna use, of whatever synth or drum machine whose patent has expired. Anyway maybe it is a good thing because people who otherwise would never have the chance to play one of the real deals thanks to price-gouging by the greedy fucks selling the originals can fairly easily afford to buy a clone. But I am still very skeptical. The originals, when well-maintained and properly taken care of, are still going strong even now, some almost 40 years old (some even older). I have my doubts as to whether the clones will last even a tenth of that, but I may be wrong, and if so, I’ll say “I was wrong, goddamit, they did a good job after all.”

Electronics advice: MAKE SURE YOU CHECK YOUR WORK AREA FLOOR FOR CUT OFF COMPONENT LEGS THAT MAY HAVE ROLLED OFF YOUR WORKBENCH. AND DON’T WORK BAREFOOT. YYEEEEEEEEEOOOOWCH!!! Yeah that was an unpleasant experience I don’t wish to repeat anytime soon.

I wonder if I posted about the MPC-500 I got and souped up. I think I did. I had some time over the winter break so I thought I’d try to get up to speed with how to run the thing, given the unavoidable differences it has with the other MPCs thanks to the smaller screen size. I put a green on black OLED in, which was a spare I had in the parts bin, and magically it was a perfect drop-in replacement for the stock display (that NEVER happens). But suddenly one time it went completely dark right in the middle of noodling with a sequence and I was like WHAT?! Cycled the power and the display would come on and off intermittently. Hmmm probably a loose connection. So I took it apart and played with the display connector and sure enough that was it. I found the wiring that goes from the main PCB to the display connector had been wire-tied down to a hole on the main PCB, so I snipped that tie and gained a bit of play, which helped. Then I hot-glued the connector to the header pins I put on the OLED. So far it’s been working fine. Here’s a photo of the area in question:

Some changes in the Collection of Nefarious Machinery are going on. I’m selling off stuff I bought on impulse and touched a few times then neglected, mostly. But also some things that I bought because I really thought I wanted them in the setup again but now that a few months have passed I realize are kinda redundant. This shit never ends.

I picked up a DX7IID recently for a pretty good price. So far, I’ve been SUPER FUCKING HAPPY with it. There is a site that hosts a goddam shit-ton of sounds for the whole series, and there are some real gems in there! Really made me overhaul my thoughts about what FM synthesis is all about. But, a few weeks ago I was fooling around and noticed the top two keys weren’t responding. Tried to wiggle them around to see if it was a bad connection and ended up pulling them out of their sockets and jarring the spring loose so the keys just dangled there. Jeez are you kidding me? So I took it apart and reassembled those two keys. A little time-consuming but not a big deal in the end.