ISO: Someone familiar with repairing machinedrums in Canada or US if possible. No repsonse from Elektron Usercare and I believe they don’t services these anymore. I have a SPS-IUW+ MKII, which has intermittantly been working. I have gone through all the steps of reseating ribbon cables, replacing batteries and even ordered the new PSU-2b power supply. Unit will work for a week, then stop booting up. I used to have have the black screen, now it just pauses and flashes the elektron symbol. Running X.11, but had issues with unit while running the official firmwares. It was bought off a friend who hadn’t used it very much at all and likely the capacitors aren’t holding much of a charge. Any tips would be appreciated!! Unit must never go to the landfill.
Hi,
Elektron still services MKII units. The first thing they’ll do is try to clean the ends of the ribbon cables and the receiver terminals with a fairly high percentage isopropyl alcohol, as they did recently (within the last 2 months approximately) with @Juniper_Steels MD which is still intermittently having issues after being returned.
My advice would be to be patient with customer support, there will probably be very few people in North America with the kind of experience repairing MD’s as them, and if you have not already tried cleaning the cables as opposed to just reseating them then it’s probably ok to do that.
As far as self repair and self diagnosis, there is no service manual available and elektron won’t provide something like that, so even most qualified techs will have to spend a lot of time (read $$) tracking down issues without many clues to go from since the best they can do is trace the circuit or test the connections looking for issues.
A guy maybe last year was having issues related to a multiplexer or a broken trace running to one? Something like that, and it seemed to be rather involved even reaching that diagnosis. From what I understand he was working with a good tech who knew what they were doing.
I think that historically people have relied on elektron support for a lot of MD repairs so aside from the general snake oil (which often works) there are not a lot of user serviceable parts inside the MD so that’s why I recommend patience and following up with elektron support if it’s been long enough that it would be warranted to do so, because with a mkII unit at least they’ll work on it vs mkI which they simply will not.
I’ve since installed a new UI board (thanks @micabeza) and it’s been working fine. That said, I’ve only been using it for about an hour at a time so I’m going to give it awhile before I consider the issue resolved. Seeing this post earlier today gave me a little reassurance…
