Hahahahaha, so, "open the floodgates" apparently means "take a month off". I'm sure future installments will be spotty as well (see what I did there?).

Noticed a mildly acrid/sweet VOC sort of smell faintly emanating from the Roland SMX-880, which has been performing line mixing duties for living room sequencing. It wasn't until I picked up a Ramsa WR 8210 for trade, which positively reeked of this exact smell, that I decided to do something about it.

I've also noticed a recent development of fizzle on some high resonance/low frequency synthesizer decays and an over all squishiness in the low end. Hopefully this is a new development and not just me finally coming around to the facts after being exposed to mixing board odor.


Since I've deemed it unlikely that I'll find service data on this unit, I went about the classic count and scratch method to tally caps (note indelible ink marks on capacitors).


The inputs are simple discrete sections, which I've more or less failed to photograph very well here. Sound quality (even now) is warm and full when compared to the modern lofty frequency response/high slew rate low headroom cookie cutter fare that fills out the ranks of low priced mixers these days. That said, it's not lush and there's a distance grit that overlays everything. I like the sound quality of this unit, though I do hope to tighten up the low frequency and lose some distortion artifacts. I guess time will tell how much of the warm girth is actually out of tolerance parts.


Over all attention to detail, as evidenced by this printed circuit star ground plane, is promising, and I look forward to replacing all the caps, washing the PCB and giving this thing another span of useful life.