Hello All,
I've been a Korg Poly-800 mk1 owner since circa 1988. Traded in my first synth, a Casio CZ-1000 + $150, for the upgrade and it was well worth it. (on a side note: last week I had an impulse buy moment on eBay and picked up a CZ-1000 again. It's fun, but much thinner sounding than I remembered)
BACKSTORY (if interested):
My Poly has been through hell and back. It survived me pounding on it for years, a nephew once, unknown to me, took it from my closest at was pounding on as a toy for a month or two while I was in college, and it survived a house fire in 1992 where a thoughtful firefighter threw it out a window to save it and it was promptly stomped on accidentally by another fireman breaking some keys. It still worked but since then I've just used another midi controller to play it. I'm hoping to fix the keys soon too but I have another more pressing issue:
Sorry, I have a bad habit of making a short story long. I'll ge onto..
THE PROBLEM:
My Poly's been shelved for several years and now I'm hoping to dust it off and Mod it and also would LOVE to add it to my rig in my band BUT I'm trying to make sure it's 100% operational first. I browsed your topics and I found a few that talk about ERR/load issues but my problem seemed just different enough where I couldn't find a solution. As I'm sure many of you have experienced, dealing with the tape interface to load patches can be frustrating and I had it down to a science last time I had the Poly running ~ 5 years ago. But this time, no matter what I attempt, I cannot load from a tape/wav/audio source. It has given me a LOAD-ERR message over 1000X now no matter what levels or audio device, or with using new cables, different sources for the load files I try… I even got desperate and tried running the signal thru compressors and EQ etc. but still no dice. I can see that it's `hearing' the signal since the `LoAd' lights are twinkling and I'm getting the Err message at the end.
Good News: The synth itself is functioning. I put in new C's and I can manually type in and edit patches and they keep in memory.
Is this a known problem? Is there a fix like a bad resistor to replace? Or is there a better way to load patches on a Poly 800 mk1? I tried a sysex/midi patch dump but… it's doesn't seem to work through Ableton since the poly 800 mk1's midi is so rudimentary.
OR….Will the Hawk-800 installation solve my patch loading issue?
Thank you kindly!
Daveyray of Jesse's First Time
www.JFTROCKS.COM