Hey guys... greetings, from Radiate FM, in sunny 'n' humid Miami, FL!
http://wrgp.org
We've been remodelling a bit lately. As a result, on my desk, I've got an actual Sontec MEP250. It lived in our station's production studio, FORGOTTEN, connected to nothing but AC power, for around 18 years!
The other night, we were going to hook up a turntable into our beloved old Pacific Recorders & Engineering BMX-II console, and the old Stanton phono preamp we pulled out of the closet had weird frequency response. The GM tried to hook it up through the Sontec, but he just got terrible noise and distortion on the right side.
I found a spare Sontec op-amp module in an envelope in my documentation file (sadly, no actual Sontec documentation there!), and tried swapping out the amps on that side one by one. That didn't fix it. The noise would come up when it was taken out of bypass; 60 hz hum with lots of harmonics (which could be manipulated amusingly using the higher freq. bands). It sounded clipped, no less. Ew.
I tried all sorts of nonsense - unplugging and reconnecting the individual active filter modules at the front of the Sontec one by one, and the buzz just refused to make itself scarce. Finally, I moved the gain pot on one of the filters with them all plugged in... and it disappeared!
The left side, meanwhile, had been operating perfectly all this time. However, I discovered a strange behavior .. if I turn the gain on more than one or two of the filters all the way down, the buzz reappears, loudly. If they're all up near -5 or above, the Sontec's quiet and works just fine. The Q and center freq controls seem to very slightly interact with this effect, but only just barely.
A possible clue: The Sontec op-amp boards run warm. Oscillation? I tried holding a piece of sheetmetal between the transformer/power supply area and the filter boards on the right; this didn't change the buzz at all, though putting my hand too close to both the transformer and the filter boards couples a mighty 60 hz. Bronx cheer into the system.
Forgive me if this is off-topic or anything... resources on the web on the Sontec seem to be few and far between. Consul pointed me this way. I tried the links earlier in the thread, but those pages seem to, sadly, be dead.
I think I definitely need to hang out on this forum more. One of our DJs is really interested in homebrew synth (and so am I). Yay.