still makes me anxious
modifying fancy synth
to improve the thing
To do the potentiometer upgrade to the DSI Evolver, you need to remove a few surface mount components from the voice board and bridge these contacts with a piece of wire. After doing the work and installing the pot board, I fired up the synth and the display went bonkers. The thing was totally broken.
Of course, I assumed it was my fault. After sending a few pictures and videos back and forth to the excellent support team at DSI, they sent me a new pot board. Still broken. So I sent them the voice board. They were flummoxed. They kept it for a month. Turns out my soldering was fine, the problem was a software bug they hadn't seen before.
Finally they got it working. When I got the board back, reassembled and powered up, I checked the firmware. It's now at 2.3, which is odd because the most up-to-date version on their website is 2.2. I called to ask what happened. Turns out they had one of their wizards actually write an OS update just for my synth, to fix the issue with the pot board. How f'n cool is that? What hardware company would go this far out of their way to support a 10 year old synth that's no longer in production? I want to send these guys a fruit basket.
A little easter egg on the PCB!