Hello all, I just wanted to share my experience debugging an issue a customer of mine was having with this machine. I couldn’t find any other accounts of this exact issue in my research and thought that someone in a similar position might appreciate the insight.
The issue: volume seems to jump to maximum unexpectedly when adjusting volume levels after power cycling the machine
Solution: disable “Use Preset Volume” in global settings
Details:
Initially I thought it was a faulty potentiometer, but it doesn’t quite lineup with the ways those components fail. Some research seemed to show that the volume level is digitally controlled and stored within the preset. So maybe there’s an issue with how the machine loads the preset volumes?
More research revealed a global setting to ignore preset volumes. I thought great, I’ll tick that and it should just sidestep the issue. it worked and I couldn’t reproduce the issue with that setting disabled. But the customer wasn’t satisfied and wanted to know exactly why and how it was showing this behaviour, so that he could be sure it wasn’t faulty.
We had trouble reliably reproducing the problem. With the flag enabled, I would try setting the volume to zero, then loading a patch where I knew the volume was set to max, but the synth wouldn’t seem to acknowledge the stored volume level. Thinking of previous models of this instrument, I knew that they had a button to enable or disable the output, but this one does not. It finally clicked for me that setting the volume to zero must be a special case and disables the output regardless of the stored volume, akin to disabling the output on those older models.
Finally we could reliably reproduce the issue.
- Store a preset with volume set to 10
- Set the volume to 3
- Restart the machine
- Play a note - sound is produced at volume 3
- Adjust the volume knob minutely in either direction
- Play a note - sound is produced at volume 10
So, what’s happening here?
When the synth boots, it initially ignores the preset volume, regardless of whether it is set to do that. It’s only once the volume is adjusted that it recalls the stored value. The knob behaviour details how adjustments to controls with stored values are interpreted. By default, it is adjusted Relatively: turning up the control will turn the stored value up by the same amount, if possible. Turning it down will turn it down, if possible. Importantly, it does not Snap to the value that you change it to - that’s a different setting.
This initialization behaviour was undocumented, and that was what was tripping us up, causing us to believe that the potentiometer was malfunctioning. But it’s Just Like That!
If I’m off base on my understanding of this machine, please let me know. This is just my interpretation based on the behaviour I’ve observed.