[sdiy] Steiner-Parker: eye-kurumba1

[Peter Grenader]

all,

I had the fortune of inheriting a Steiner-Parker Systhasystem from a dear
friend who recently passed away.  Great little modular, with pnme of the
best filters out there and some of the cleanest analog sinewaves I've ever
seen.

Most of it works, some didn't at first and I've since gotten them on-line,
some are still scrwd up --> the three input VCA/Mixer and the third osc.

Both work, sort of.  The VCO acts like it's being controlled by a sloped
random voltage and the Mixer is giving me about an 1/8 of the output levels
of the rest of the box.

But this isn't why I'm posting.

I removed the VCA/Mixer from the box last night and found what I would
consider the worst workmanship I've seen in many many years.  90% of the
joints were cold, globbed on like the head of a Fosters Freeze cone. Flux
was caked on so thick in some places you could not see the solder
underneath. Bits of solder all over the wire housing. It was just a fright.


Cleaning it up didn't do didley for my problem, so me thinks one or both of
the two output trannies (MPS 5172) have taken a powder.  I've got
replacements on order.

I was also surprised to see that none of the boards in this machine were
either soldermasked OR solder plated!  They were soldering directly to
copper traces.  That and the fact that many of the holes were not in the
center of the pad leads me to beleive that Nyle was making these boards in
his kitchen.  It is also interesting that there are only three different
board sizes in the machine.  Again, I think he made these on his own.

Remarkable as the machine really sounds good.  The filter is breathtaking,
outside of the one wack one, the oscillators are stable and pure -
everything outside of the phasor (which is a litttle weak) is top notch
sonically.

Intersting however I heard the another Steiner osc, on one of Roger
Cordell's Synthacons and it also had this wack unstable frequency  problem.
If any of you have any experience with this sepcific anomoly with SP gear,
please let me know.

P