Video about the internals of some well known synths

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If you are interested in having a look inside a CS80, Prophet 5 Rev 1 and a Juno 106, then have a look at this video:

Prepare for a long but interesting video!

Anthony Marinelli has played all of these synths and wants to know what lies inside them, so he visits Rob Rosen who repairs and refurbishes synths. One thing I found very interesting to see is that the Prophet 5 Rev 1 because of stability issues got some buffering ICs added on the PCB. Because there was no more room, they were glued on the back of other ICs and wires were used to connect them to the signal sources they were supposed to buffer. Have a look at t=1:02:00 Rob explains that even in revision 2 you would see this. So if you have to spoil your PCB by adding a small circuit or some wires to it to solve a problem you encounter after building your module, don’t fret, the pro’s had to do that as well, now and then.

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I’ve been watching a few videos by SynthChaser on youtube. Apart from them being adds for the services they provide, they also contain a lot of interesting information about how analog and digital synthesizers were built back in the day. When opened up you can see that some of them are really crammed with ICs. I especially like the bit of the videos where the workings of the synths or parts there of are explained. E.g. in this video some of the sounds of a LinnDrum do not have the right volume:

A schematic of the linndrumm is shown and the workings of that part of the synth is explained step by step by going over the schematic. That is really insightfull. In these videos sometimes the first sign of a defect is only the beginning of finding the real problem but in the end the devices are repaired.

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