followed this, and it works! :) thanks! after looking at the receipt, i bought the thing for 3 bucks, and my wife said "the last person who had it probably plugged it up, pressed some keys, said "this is junk" and gave it to the thrift store" so 3 dollar synth, 10 bucks in batteries, and now i'm rockin' and rolling :) thanks again.
--- In korgpolyex@yahoogroups.com, "longenough2002" <backshall1@...> wrote:
>
> Yes, you're in for a real treat if you've never worked with any of these first attempts at analog synth with digital control. Your Poly-800 may or may not have an internal lithium cell for memory backup. If there is one, it's dead. Putting 6 "C" cells in the battery compartment will allow it to save patches. Otherwise, all patches will be lost when it is turned off.
> As for loading the factory patches, it's a .wav file (audio). It's encoded data, so it sounds like a modem, and needs to be played into the From Tape jack on the back of the Poly-800. Some people do this directly from a computer audio out. Some people burn it onto an audio CD and use a CD Walkman to play it into the Poly-800. Originally, the patch data came on a cassette tape and any cassette player could be use. To get the Poly-800 ready to accept data, move the switches on the back to Tape Enable and Program Write Enable, then press "Load" (the "1" button). Play the wav data file into From Tape jack, and wait for "Good" or "Err" to show up in the display. Volume levels are a bit tricky to get a good load.
> Aside from all that, you should still be able to test the rest of the synth by going through all the parameters and setting them to something reasonable. When the memory is empty, the most obvious reasons for no sound are Attack time way too long, Sustain way too low, or Filter Cutoff way too low. Unfortunately, a completely uninitialized memory chip can have completely out-of-range values for some parameters, so you may see some strange things in the display as you go through the parameters.
>
> Don B.
>