their discord page is flooded with people with all sort of hardware issues.
in summary this is too much a DIY product IMO, this is why there are so many hardware issues.
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I totally get that hardware can have issues. The question is how to deal with them. And right now, thereās just a lot of uncertainty, maybe even at Torso itself. But I think this is also a big chance for a company to build trust in the long runābut then theyād have to be more open and transparent about it.
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But I donāt get why not sort it, if there really is a problem? In the End there is at least two year warranry and they need to fix faulty units anyway. I bought one if thomann. I hope all is fine, if not I hope they sort it out
if the hardware issue is in the type of the part used, you can fix it once, twice, but it will always breakā¦they need to re-engineer it together with solid QC test in place
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while there are definitely problems its not like every machine has tons of flaws. I used mine for two weeks and had only 1 bug, albeit a machine breaking (recording to disk just didnāt work, had to do a factory reset). But none of the other mentioned bugs.
Still, with there being this many reports its a bad sign for the company, but i would check what your workflow is and just try it out if possible.
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Can confirm.
Outside of some of the initial software issues (I ordered from the very first batch) Iāve not had any issues since they patches most of them, and I never had any hardware issues.
The quality seems fine, and all I can say is that the knob caps arenāt coated with the rubber no one seems to want, and they are smoother and with little resistance compared to Elektron encoders.
They donāt feel cheap the way my old Behringer BCR2000 felt, just different, and no issues with skipping, just takes a little while to get used to them.
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Used 3 different units, no issues w/ hardware.
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Got a white one. Main Encoder is jumpy. Nice.
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I still love the BCR 2000 to be honest, I still have it these days and the knobs are super solid no skippy, loose or jumpy. For the price I paid it was an amazing midi controller that was working very well with both software and hardware. I used to map it to Reason rack and it was a quite capable device.
BCR is also compatible with Atelier which is an amazing news.
Sometimes i try to follow a cool sound for a while, get bored and flip it around to find something else worth exploring. Itās so easy to get lost in sound with the S4.
And in almost every session thereās a point where i want to switch it off because i canāt seem to get something good out of it today. But if i keep on it i mostly get rewarded.
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Jumpy as in uncontrollable or skips every now and again?
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Skips almost everytime when scrolling down. Skips more with more velocity, but you canāt get it to not jump by moving slowly. You can reach the next step by turning just a little bit but not clicking a step.
To my feeling, it is a stepped encoder but it doesnāt seem to count, it maps the movement. Itās obviously low quality.
The other encoder seem to work But Nevertheless they really seem to be poor quality shit too. I donāt get why cutting corners at one of the cheapest parts.
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Thats it. Even with sale drop on Thomann I guess Iāll hold with my purchase until MKII or whatever model comes out. Until then my granular duties will need to be done with my lemondrop and Microcosm. I cant be bothered with shipping the unit back and forth in case its faulty. And the inability of this company to address that clearly there is an issue speaks for itself.
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I think that tolerances on stepped encoders need to be quite tight for the programming to work well with them (because the values are not discrete), the easiest fix would be to use a normal encoder. As what it sounds like is happening is that rolling over a step sometimes increases the value by too much. But if the tolerance isnāt tight enough then if they change the programming then youād get missed steps which would be just as annoying.
This IS something you could fix with programming though. Via individual unit calibration (and recalibration) and, at slower speeds, detecting indents by how the values change. Where it would be tricky, and is maybe whatās happening, is that the steps may not be exactly even. Still something that could be calibrated but itās a lot of effort and overhead to fix the problem.
If I were to DIY a fix Iād just put a normal encoder in itās place.
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I bought it in November 2024 and I had exactly the same issues you have described - at the time I thought that I had been very unlucky - few ppl here were having these issues or concern about the poor hardware - now there are more and more people also on their Discord page and it seems even the white version is impacted; this suggests it is a bigger problemā¦
I do not know what to recommend, in my case I returned it even though I really liked the machineā¦
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the encoders are soldered on the PCB- a DIY replacement of the encoder would require you to re-solder the new encoder to the PCB - totally doable
Yep absolutely, as long as you know how to use a soldering iron and a wick then itās a fairly straightforward job - or you could pay someone a very small sum to do it for you.
It wouldnāt personally put me off owning one if it really wanted it.
But it should be the way. Shure you can replace it yourself but you then have to calibrate it in software which you canāt do yourself.
I donāt get why anyone is using stepped encoders in the first place, there is no need. Elektron doesnāt do it.
Op1 and Xy do ir and it makes no sense. They are working but one click isnāt one list switch, it always skips one. For values it males no sense at all.
As long as you use a compatible part it will ājust workā, but i do agree that you shouldnt HAVE to do it. But sometimes thatās just life. If you want the thing then thatās the cost.
Well, 600 post later (see around 3100) and still talking about the encoder. I think itās not normal. There is a serious issue with that. Iām with my third unit because the encoder problem.
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