Vintage Synth Repair

Hi everyone.

My ARP OMNI Mk.1 has a drone whenever the release slider is set more than zero. When set to zero it's fine. No drone. When I press down on more than two keys however, it comes in whether the release is zero or not.

When I bought it was totally shot even though cosmetically you could eat off it. I had the repairs done and it lasted a year or so before this showed up. 

I'm gonna take it in soon, but would like to know what the matter may be beforehand. I use it quite often. Last time it set me back around $400 that including my ARP SEIV which also had an issue.

Thank you.

Hi Gary,

Change out all the 22uF (or is it 2.2uF?) tantalum caps on the upper and lower voice board.  You could figure out which note is "stuck" and just change that one, but best to change them all.  On mine they were all little blue and pea sized.  It might be good to use nonpolarized electro's of 5% to 10%.

I changed all the caps and cmos in mine (mk 2).

Be sure to read this:  http://peterunderdog.com/arp/repair.html

-TF

--- In vintagesynthrepair@yahoogroups.com, "GaryM" <mirazmusik@...> wrote:

>
> Hi everyone.
> 
> My ARP OMNI Mk.1 has a drone whenever the release slider is set more than zero. When set to zero it's fine. No drone. When I press down on more than two keys however, it comes in whether the release is zero or not.
> 
> When I bought it was totally shot even though cosmetically you could eat off it. I had the repairs done and it lasted a year or so before this showed up. 
> 
> I'm gonna take it in soon, but would like to know what the matter may be beforehand. I use it quite often. Last time it set me back around $400 that including my ARP SEIV which also had an issue.
> 
> Thank you.
>

I recall having a similar problem with an Omni (even after replacing all
the notorious tantalum caps). It turned out that the connector coming from
the Sustain jack was put on backwards...