[sdiy] Ensoniq ASR-X weirdness

[ChristianH]

This reminds me of a problem that had been reported back in the late 90s
on the AKAI mailing list. The AKAI samplers (I think S2000, but possibly
others too) appear to have a fuse for termination power, which sometimes
blows.

I never had that problem myself, but reading "software setting" reminded
me of that situation - it might well be that the software setting does
not behave as intended because of something like that.

If you have enough old SCSI stuff around, you may try putting the
sampler *not* at the end of the chain, but use an additional external
device (or one of those chunky terminator plugs) for termination. 
But, if the Ensoniq is like the AKAIs, this won't work. The AKAI has
only one SCSI connector (and that's not even a real one, but a SUB-D 25
instead), so that would require tinkering with a T-cable. No fun with
SCSI, not to mention that reflections will be pretty uncontrollable. And
termination is about reflections (or the lack of), after all...

Chris



On Wed, 2 Dec 2015 10:10:31 -0500 Travis Thatcher <recompas at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Thanks Brian,
> 
> Yeah its been quite some time since I had my MPC SCSI setup...like 16
> years? The ASR-X does have internal termination and the zip drives
> I've tested also have a switch on the back for termination on that end
> as well. I'm just going with the sampler and drive so no intermediate
> devices. My guess is that the ASR isn't actually terminating properly
> - it is a software setting that seems to be set correctly.
> Unfortunately the ASR doesn't have a second scsi port so I can just
> stick on a terminator. I might try to open it up and test if the
> actual termination is happening on the Ensoniq end. I'm also going to
> try to stick a terminated scsi cd rom at the end of the chain tonight
> to see if that helps.
> 
> 
> On Wed, Dec 2, 2015 at 1:11 AM,  <rsdio at audiobanshee.com> wrote:
> > I forgot to mention that Ensoniq did not strictly use DOS formatting, at least not for the EPS. You can sometimes read an ENSONIQ floppy from DOS, but there is one extra sector per track, so the disk holds more data. Also, the format is entirely unlike DOS, so you need a special program to read the data.
> >
> > I wrote such a program for my NeXT Computer back in the days when my EPS saw daily use. That allowed any SCSI device (hard drive, floppy, Zip, etc) to be read in the Ensoniq format, and allowed transferring files between Ensoniq and other devices. But you can't read an EPS disk with standard formatting.
> >
> > I suspect that you have SCSI termination issues. Once you solve those, you should be able to format a disk so that the ASR-X can read it. If you get the Chicken Head software that others have mentioned, this should allow you to read Ensoniq disks from your PC.
> >
> > Brian
> >
> >
> > On Dec 1, 2015, at 5:58 PM, Travis Thatcher <recompas at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> I've got a terminator and a scsi cd drive I can try on the end of the
> >> chain tomorrow. I think it is weird that even if I insert a brand new
> >> pc formatted zip disk the status still says 'Unreadable'. I thought
> >> the ASR-X used DOS formatting... I may just give up in the end and get
> >> an sd floppy emulator. I don't plan on putting huge samples on this
> >> thing but it'd be nice to have the larger storage option.
> >>
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> http://www.travisthatcher.com
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