http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=3777760758&fromMakeTrack=true
I picked mine up for @ $600 US last spring and it is now being gone ver with a fine tooth comb. It was in near perfect condition when I bought it as well. Will be interesting to see if anyone bites at the price he’s asking. Also there is a Mini D for sale.
That’s an absolutely bullshit ad…I wouldn’t pay more than what you did GD for a nice one…although I still consider the source to be one of the most underappreciated moog. I’m sure the bids for that thing are going just flood in.
Gee, I’ve been having trouble deciding whether to buy one @ Guitar Center for $549! It shows a bit of its age cosmetically, but it sounds and plays perfectly! If I didn’t already have a Voyager, it would be a no-brainer. Of course, it’s been sitting there for almost 3 months at that price, so I guess I can think about it for a while longer 
-andrwe bunny
The only thing to be careful about is if the front panel switches look like they had heavy use. With the membrane that could be a touchie situation. I don’t know where or if you could get parts for it if the membrane fails. Great little synth, but it didn’t sell anywhere near what they had expected.
Mike T.
The bloody thing’s still there, too. Not being clocked, but it’s available in an eBay store at the asking price. Shouldn’t someone tell the seller to take it off and re-think it:?
The seller can ask whatever they want and the buyer can make their own decision.
Besides, the area between a decent example and a pristine example can often fetch a disproportional amount. Same for cars, guitars, homes, etc.
Also, just because a Source looks good and the buttons work, doesn’t mean it may be a great deal if it’s cheap. Calibrating a Source correctly can be a real bear.
The Source uses an oscillator design that heats a chip. If anyone in the past messed with that adjustment or it’s fallen out of spec since made, correctly setting this trimmer requires some patience, brains, a stable room temperature and a thermometer. Not fun. So, finding a cheap Source that’s “just” out of tune a bit, could conceiveably cost over $100 to put it back in tune. Adjusting some items on a source demand a scope and a very accurate voltmeter.
(Multimoogs are even worse- they have TWO temperature adjustments, one for each oscillator.)
I quit fixing Sources for the most part.
The last failure I saw? The screw from the rubber foot was touching the PCB’s underside and shorting out a VCO. The screw was stock, but the board had warped downward over all the years and made contact.
had several problems:
the membrane started failing after i began using it. i think it was on the edge, and my finger presses put it over. fortunately, at the time i was still able to get a fresh membrane from the guy back east who used to hold old moog inventory.
then it stopped powering up. i’d noticed that it [all sources] run hot in the back. opening the machine, i saw that the case was used as a heatsink, and that the traces on the main board near the heatsink had eroded away from years of this torture. i used solid core insulated wire and bridged the traces, and the machine worked.
it played in tune all the time i had it, and i loved the instrument from a player’s perspective, but i was always terrified of the next breakdown in the thing. tons of electronics in there, some stuff like the ‘chopper’ on the encoder is no longer available. also, i had noise leaking into the pulse waveform on osc2, and was never able to trace that problem. when playing, it wasn’t really noticeable, but it was a bit aggravating when i turned down VCO1, brought up VCO2 and monkeyed with the pulse wave. not pure hash, but it gave that VCO a fuzzy, grainy character.
another thing: i installed the encore MIDI retrofit into the thing. a brilliant upgrade, but there is one caveat: when installed, a fast spin of the encoder caused the VCO frequency to briefly droop, then recover when the encoder was stopped. this bugged me, as i’d developed a playing technique which involved really spinning that encoder a lot.
as i’ve said before here, i loved that source. but i was always worried about it, and eventually i sold it because of that worry.
hope this helps.
lx
The source sounds amazing but it is sometimes a bit unpredictable. Mine stays perfectly in tune. The only problem i have is that the volume for vco2 cant be turned down anymore, even if the display reads 0. Anyone know what the problem might be. I rememeber i had a problem with the circuit boards collapsing onto each other and shorting out certain functions temporarily so maybe this is the problem.
The Encore Source kit was a problem for me too.
I had received two Sources from the band Beck to modify with Midi.
After I installed one kit, I moved the jog wheel and the pitch drooped down and came back. I thought it was broken. It didn’t say anywhere in the ad or instructions that it would do this. I spent hours troubleshooting what I thought was a mistake by myself, only to find this is “normal.”
I asked the band if I should mod the other one the same way and received a huge “No! We have to tweak the filter and envs while playing”
So, I tried to return the unused kit and had to fight for a refund that arrived many weeks later. I wonder how many other people also didn’t expect that once you add this kit, the unit cannot be edited and played at the same time, even if the MIDI isn’t being used. To me, it adds one feature and takes another way.
Good for studio MIDI use, but terrible for live performance.
Encore should have made the Source kit include its own CPU, but because it hogs t he processor cycles, the jog wheel can’t be used at the same time without problems.
I’ve done plenty of live gigging with my Encore’d Source and it has worked fine. Of course I don’t tweak it during live performance either, I set all my patches beforehand and play it from the presets. And mine does have that “VCO droop” when the data wheel is spun fast.
If filter sweeps are a big part of your performance, the latest Encore kit does receive 14-bit MIDI CC for filter cutoff. It doesn’t cure the data wheel problem but it does offer an alternative that works better.
I should also point out that I used better sockets to mate with the Encore board. I’ve had one too many times when the board slipped out of the original RAM sockets and I lost my patches (backups saved the gig).
With all due respect MC “live” playing to you is that of being a multikeyboardist.
To someone else, it might be their only synth and all they play live or have a style that depends on real time tweaks of the various parameters. To you, having the presets might be enough, but to someone else, losing live editing might be too much to compromise.
Since it’s been a few years since I had an Encore’d Source in front of me though, I’m curious if the pitch droops when setting the vco intervals. ?
If so, isn’t it kind of tough to do? It would seem to be very hard to touch up a slightly loose vco during a live performance, if so. MC?
All true Kevin; when I gigged with my Source it had zero drift. I touch up the scale before the show and it’s rock solid, never had to fix loose VCOs during performance. I guess I’m lucky I got a good Source. The trimpots do go bad, I replaced a scale trim years ago and it’s been fine, now I got other ones dying on me. I hope one of them is not the TEMP trimpot.