[sdiy] Repairability of modern analog synths

[Roman Sowa]

None of those thing is made for repair. It's not $50k telecom card that 
is worth repairing. Neither of the old classics were made with repair in 
mind. Actually the big Rolands and Oberheims were made like "let's get 
this thing out the door quickly, there's tradeshow in 3 weeks and it 
must work by then! We'll have another model in 2 years and everybody 
will forget this one". It's only history that showed those instruments 
were not forgotten. Bummer.

Of course with proper equipment, experience and skills anything can be 
repaired. Like for example you can scratch through 12 layers of copper 
and solder a wire to one lead of big BGA chip soldered on the other side 
(I've read a story about that). But I digress. It was already said, 
nobody wants to use 40 or 60 years old technology in modern designs. 
Because those parts are disapearing, because it's cheaper not to do it 
this way, because smaller stuff performs much faster, and because other 
makers would laugh. It is actually easier to desolder SMD parts than 
thru-hole. For example I can remove SOIC16 chip in 4 seconds, while 
doing it with DIP would take a minute, and still there's a danger of 
damaging hole plating.

But I agree there's a whole bunch of bad stuff associated with SMD:
1. you have to know how to deal with that, so less repair techs are 
there to choose from.
2. it's so damn cheap that repair will most likely be more expensive 
than buying new one. Which means rarely anyone will want to repair
3. the chip pins are so dense that it takes a grain of dust and a 
glympse of humidity to cause a short. Not to mention tin whiskers which 
can grow that far in several weeks with proper conditions. Of course 
modern lead-free solder is anything like the one from 20 years ago, but 
tin whiskers grow even from leaded solder.
4. every 2-3 years there's new package coming for everything. Resistors 
have shrinked to 5% of old sizes if not smaller, plain stupid opamps are 
now offered in more than 10 packages, and even with different pinouts. 
More than likely that in 10 years it will be tough to replace broken 2mm 
QFN opamp with then most popular 1mm NFP (that's not real package, just 
my own acronym, try to guess what it means)
5. so easy to assemble with no human presence that it is no problem at 
all to put more and more stuff in. It's small and cheap, lets put 
moooore. Then customers see more and want even more, more, more and 
cheaper. And then it's closed circle of mad chase.

Well, that's some rant. You wanted "any comments", tight?

Roman

W dniu 2020-10-19 o 20:54, Antti Pitkämäki pisze:
> Hi,
>
> What is the opinion here on the repairability of modern analog synths? 
> I mean stuff like the Arturia Matrixbrute, the new Prophet stuff and 
> the Moog One. Have they been designed to be repairable like vintage 
> synths (yeah I know some vintage synths are easier to repair than 
> others…)? Is it just a matter of learning to work with SMD components 
> or could there be some problems not associated with vintage gear?
>
> One thing that is scary is the possibility of having a broken trace 
> inside a multilayer PCB. I have no clue whether this would be a common 
> problem or just a theoretical one.
>
> So what do you think, will these modern SMD based synths still be 
> repairable after 30 years? I have the understanding that Alesis 
> Andromedas are particularly nasty to get repaired, but maybe (and 
> hopefully!) other ”new” stuff is better in this regard?
>
> I have an old Farfisa Compact Duo organ from 1965, and it will likely 
> outlive me (although broken tuning coils can be a bit of a problem in 
> those). I like the idea of instruments that are meant to last. I hate 
> the idea of throwing away a 20 year old synth just because it’s broken 
> beyond repair. I don’t care if it’s cheap to buy a new one, I hate the 
> thought of wasted resources and the resultant unnecessary negative 
> environmental impact.
>
> Long post, but with all the interesting new analog synths I started 
> wondering about this…
>
> Any opinions and comments would be much appreciated!
>
> Best regards,
> Antti
>
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