Good evening. I have a story to tell about my mk1 MachineDrum.
I have been the proud owner of this machine, that is almost as old as me, for 6 years.
I bought it secondhand as my first hardware synthesizer.
It was cheap because the encoders were buggy and changed values quite randomly when turned (Not to mention the embarrassingly botched homemade power brick, more about that later).
I loved the machine regardless, and it loved me back for many years.
After getting some experience with soldering i took the task to finally replace the encoders about 2 years ago.
Success! The new encoders were smooth as butter and i had breathed new life into the mk1.
About a year ago the first shutdown happened.
I couldn’t turn it on…
I left the studio, and when i came back about 20 mins later it had turned on again, and i started working. Then i came home and tried to turn it on, and again, it couldn’t.
I was gonna open it up to find the issue, but the new encoder shafts were so tightly inside the knobs, that i could not even pry the off, to open the machine.
Skip to a year later. I had left it under my bed in an old leaky house with a broken heater and the cold weather had made the plastic shafts shrink, so i was able to finally pry off the knobs and open the machine up.
I quickly found the blown fuse, replaced it, put it back together and turned it on ecstatically.
It finally worked, but not for long. Later that night i turned it back on, heard a loud sound in my headphones and it went black again…
I changed another fuse, rinse and repeat (I also cleaned the inside from dust and metal grains from the faceplate screws and my diy soldering, with compressed air and a ESD-safe brush)
Now it works, but i won’t turn it on again until i have found a new power brick.
The transformer in the brick delivers 7.5V AC to the MD instead of 6V AC.
I’m going to ask Elektron support about this, but first i will ask you guys. Can you measure your MD power brick’s output voltage for me, and confirm that it is indeed not 7.5V?
Another question: Has anyone encountered anything similar to this?
If not the power brick, it could obviously be a failure on the power supply PCB that’s drawing too much current. I don’t have much troubleshooting experience though, so do you have any recommendations as to what i should measure for with my multimeter?
This machine has a special place in my heart, and i die a little inside everytime that fuse blows
