First post, by Leon53_de
My apologies for the crosspost: I did not see earlier, that there is a subforum for sound specifically!
I hope somebody will be able to point me into the correct direction here.
Some months ago I purchased a Roland SC-88, but at that time I could not find the time to test the device.
Now some days ago, I finally got the time to check it out and it turned out to be partially faulty: It was not booting always reliably (sometimes started OK, sometimes not at all) and sometimes it just stopped working after some minutes, so would not react anymore on a button press and the display was stuck also. For the small times it was working I could press the preview button, which made the respective bar in the display indicating, that a sound should have been played and the same was showing, when connected to a midi keyboard, but no sound came out of the SC-88.
Reviewing this board for information turned out, that faulty/leaking SMD caps on the mainboard were a possible reason for that behaviour. So I decided to remove these and the funny smell while desoldering these, which was described in some posts over here, was somewhat proving that I was doing something right.
After replacing these caps with 'regular' (not SMD) ones, partially with a higher voltage, the device is now booting up fine always, it produces sound, when the preview button is pressed.
BUT no midi input is being detected by the device at all; meaning if I connect it to my midi keyboard, I cannot play the sound in that way. I tried multiple midi input devices and also mutiple cables.
On the internet I found the Service Manual, which also comes with the schematics: the midi/battery test goes until that point where Midi In A is blinking, but not any further. I also checked voltage and reset signals on IC11 (I do not own an oscilloscope unfortunately, so just testing things with a regular multimeter).
As mentioned in the other post, I re-soldered the connections from the Midi DIN connectors already. So these are apparently not causing my issue. Also since all MIDI inputs do not work, (In A, In B back and In B Front) that is likely not the culprit...
So at this point I am somewhat stuck now, not knowing what I could do to fix it completely... any help/hint is highly appreciated!