New Hope For Old Moogs--A Clever MM5823 Retrofit From The UK

[germaniac]

Hey Friends,

A while back I bought a crippled Realistic/Moog MG-1 and quickly became educated as to the common problem with them: failing MM5823 divider chips. One of mine was dead.

I made a couple forays into resuscitating it. A good friend helped by coming up with a rather amazing off-the-top-of-his-head workaround, and I even sprang for the purchase of two rare genuine MM5823s. Unfortunately I never found the time to build my friend's workaround (which as it turns out would have worked perfectly), nor did I use the expensive MM5823s for fear they'd eventually go south.

But now I'm happy to report there's an absolutely solid and inexpensive retrofit for this chip available from a fellow named Chris Burrell, here:

http://www.flatkeys.co.uk/MM5823N.html

When I contacted Chris, he responded promptly to my emails, shipped the parts from UK to USA in about a week, and offered to help if I needed any technical support, which I did not. Now my MG-1 is alive and kicking like brand new! Thanks and kudos to you Chris!

So, if anyone's got an old Moog (or other synth) that needs these chips, you owe it to yourself to check out Chris's clever retrofit at Flatkeys. Highly recomended!

Regards,
Joe

[electrical_engineer_gEEk]

awesome, thanks for letting us know about this, we should ask chris to see if he can do anything about the Opus 3 TOS chip too....

[dave500]

here is the chip on Ebay
http://cgi.ebay.com/moog-liberation-mg- ... dZViewItem

[germaniac]

Chris has been very responsive via email, so I'm sure he'd be able to tell you right away whether he would be interested/able to do that TOS chip.

I have nothing but good things to say about chipforbrains and his slider replacement kit, which I got for my MG-1. He seems the only game in town for the genuine MM5823, and you can't blame him for selling such unobtainium for a premium price.

For that matter, Chris at Flatkeys could probably double his price (about $4.50 USD each) and it would still be a deal, but I hope he doesn't do that!

[Kevin Lightner]

Fwiw, the same basic thing has been available for years through Organservice.com, but these ones from the UK are much less expensive.

http://www.organservice.com/crm/topdividers.htm

Top Octave generators are much harder to make substitutes for, however this same company listed above has some available.

I should add that both of these 5823/5824 substitutes feature square pins.
They'll be fine in circuit boards and some IC sockets, but probably won't fit if the instrument has had high quality machined sockets previously installed.

[chris_flatkeys]

Hi All,

First post so not completely sure if i should be responding here or starting a new thread.

The divider chip retros now have a TOS counterpart. Finally, it's taken a while, we have made a replacement for the MK50240 and it also does every other TOG ever made.

We are making the first prodution run this week and i am looking forward to trying them out in the polymoog. It's possible to change key and the scale - because they are real synthesisers rather than just dividers. In the polymoog this means that you can tune the two a fifth apart (for example) amongst other things.

Of course they can be used in the Opus and MG-1 etc which was mentioned earlier in the thread.

I hope this is of use.

Kind regards

Chris B