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The Road is Long
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Antimon



Joined: Jan 18, 2005
Posts: 4145
Location: Sweden
Audio files: 371
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PostPosted: Sun Dec 04, 2016 4:04 am    Post subject: The Road is Long
Subject description: or: A Tale of Fluttering Volume
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So I have this Kurzweil MicroEnsemble that use with my Yamaha KX88 for some regular piano playing. Lately (a couple of months or so) I had started to notice that the sound was acting unsteady, like something was causing the volume to fluctuate randomly.

It wasn't so bad at first, and I use that piano setup mostly for practice, but after a while it got worse and it started getting on my nerves.

I explained my dilemma in chat, and someone said that a common culprit is the patchbay. As I am using a patchbay in the sound chain I tried hooking up the sound on the front instead of the back (my Alto patchbay has a default wiring from top to bottom on the stuff you connect at the back, unless you plug something into the lower jacks at the front, which overrides the top jack at the back). It started to sound better.

I didn't really want to have wires dangling from the front, so I changed to another pair of jack columns next to the ones I had been using. Sounded ok.

A few days later the problem was back. Jeez, I thought, those patchbay jacks are broken too? I tried connecting on the front like I did with the previous jacks, still the same problem.

At this point I was starting to doubt that the patchbay was the issue, so I looked at the little mixer I had between the patchbay and the Kurzweil. Maybe if I try some other input on the mixer... Yeah! That did it!

No wait... the flutter came back after a while.

I was starting to freak out at this point, getting more and more red in the face, so I started removing things from the audio chain:

* I hooked up the mixer directly to the MOTU audio interface, ditching the patchbay altogether. No luck.
* I hooked up the Kurzweil direcly to the MOTU, ditching the mixer. No luck. WTF!?

I stared at the Kurzweil box, picked it up and turned it over. Was it broken? How could it break like this, it's about as simple a ROMpler as you can get, a couple of buttons, a red led display, stereo output and two MIDI jacks.

Frantically, I banged hard on the keys on the KX88. I noticed the four sliders on the KX88. I moved each up and down. When moving the second slider, the volume went to zero and then back to full again, and fluttered a bit. I slid it up and down fast a few times, and the flutter disappeared.

So what had been happening all along was my KX88 kept sending MIDI CC messages for the volume control, because of a cranky slider.

For a moment I got ecstatic over finding the source of my issues, then I felt really stupid that it took me so long to find the problem. My studio was at this point in a bit of a disarray, cables everywhere. I know I want to connect everything back the way it was, but it will take some effort (reaching into my rack to access the rear of the patchbay is a pain), and I will think about how stupid I am the whole time.

So there, I've made a long boring post about how stupid I am, hope you enjoyed it. Maybe you have some similar tales of your own, of painful troubleshooting that ended in an embarrassing discovery?

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Skrog Productions



Joined: Jan 07, 2009
Posts: 1196
Location: Scottish Borders
Audio files: 155

PostPosted: Sun Dec 04, 2016 4:08 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

soak the KX88 in cider and leave outside for an Elk to deal with Smile , good that you traced the problem Smile Smile .

Dave.
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blue hell
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Joined: Apr 03, 2004
Posts: 24079
Location: The Netherlands, Enschede
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PostPosted: Sun Dec 04, 2016 5:31 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

oh ... just like what I had, took me months to find out it was the compressor ... it happens Confused
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Jan
also .. could someone please turn down the thermostat a bit.
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