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[Jack89]

Hello! I have owned a (broken) SH-101 for about 4 years now, bought it off ebay apparently in perfect working order then after about 40 mins of excitedly playing with it a truly horrible distorted sound appeared which continued thereafter. I could still vaguely hear the notes but underneath a disgusting wall of mess.
I forgot about it for ages and then bought a new power supply for it about a year ago and when i turned it on it worked! but then the same thing happened again, i decided to take it into one of the guys who work at my uni as they had fixed an old sampler i had before and he suggested getting a whole new set of parts from technologytransplant.com which i did but apparently that has not worked either. The same thing happens... it works for a little while and then turns horrible, or doesn't make any sound at all.

I just find it interesting that it would work and then not, and after seeing videos of circuit bent SH-101's on this site i am more desperate than ever to get the thing working! Unfortunately i am a student and a very poor one at that. Has anyone heard of this kind of problem before? Or think they know why this could be happening?

Or even a place i could send to get it fixed which doesn't cost the earth! Any advice would be greatly appreciated

[Jack89]

oops sorry didn't see there was a section dedicated to repairs

[Circuitbenders]

Does it do the same thing with batteries and an external power supply?

When you say it 'turns horrible' and has a 'disgusting wall of mess' can you be any more specific?

If you turn it off, leave it for a while and then turn it on again, is the time it takes to go weird again directly proportional to how long its been left turned off?

If it is, it'd probably indicate that something is malfunctioning as it warms up and gets to a certain temperature. This could be something in the power supply section of the board, which might be easy to fix but difficult to track down, or the CEM3340 VCO chip, which could be easy to track down but expensive to fix. A load of new sliders  etc from technology transplant is never going to fix either of these issues.

The first thing  i'd probably try is to see if anything is getting hot. Specifically anything over on the far right of the synth board (with the back off, face down with the keys towards you) in the power area, or the CEM3340 (around the middle of the board, slightly off to the left)

[Jack89]

Thanks for the reply! Sorry i cant be much more specific about the sound its just a very loud horrible constantly changing grainy distorted noise.

Regarding your questions i have not yet done any done any extensive testing to see if the off time and working time have any correlation, or tried it with batteries at all but i will do when i collect it from university in a couple of days. I will post back when i have results!