I bought a beautiful Yamaha 5’2” grand, love it. It came with a Yahaha Disklavier DKC100R unit (the one that uses the floppy disks), and the original owner had it wired up underneath with an amplifier, speakers, really nice. The original owner also gave me a few dozen floppies of various genres which I have enjoyed immensely.
About 6 months ago the unit was generating an error every time I would put a different disk in. I took a handful of the disks that it failed with, down to the local dealer, where each of them played just fine. So the tech came out and made some adjustments to the unit, then they worked fine.
Now 6 months later, the same thing is happening, and its not from overuse because the number of times I’ve used the unit since the te ch was here 6 months ago can be counted on one hand.
Perhaps it needs an upgrade? What would you suggest? A new disk drive? Upgrade to CD? (Yikes, $1700!) Or am I further ahead to get something where I could put a thumb drive into a USB port and have it play music from there? If the latter, does the thumb drive need to be formatted in a special way so that the unit can read it?
Thanks!
Message
Re: [disklavier] Disklavier problem - upgrade or fix?
2014-06-28 by George Frederick Litterst
Jon, your model Disklavier is a Mark II and was made between 1992 and 1997. It supports double-density floppy disks but not high density floppy disks. It records in E-SEQ format and does not recording in the industry-standard SMF format although it will play back SMF files if they are Type 0.
If you can get the necessary circuit boards from Yamaha, you can cleanly replace your control unit with a DKC-850. The DKC-850 will provide you with innumerable benefits. You can check it out here:
If the replacement circuit boards are not available, you can upgrade to the DKC-850 in a piggyback manner in which the new control unit connects to the old control unit with MIDI cables. Functionally, the main difference between using the DKC-850 as a replacement control unit vs. an add-on control unit is that the add-on scenario does not support DisklavierRadio and DisklavierTV.
Regards,
PianoBench
On Jun 28, 2014, at 8:25 AM, 'Jon Arnold' jonarnold@... [disklavier] <;disklavier@yahoogroups.com> wrote: