After acquiring an Emu SP-12 that i did not have after selling mine nearly ten years ago i had to rethink my setup here. My Ikea built DJ desk really got full and there was practically no place for more gear on it. Plus, the way i arranged it, i couldn't reach the mixer from all places that i worked at. The plan was to build another rollable desk to fit my SP-12, the mixer, my Akai S-950 it´s Zip-Drive, Soundcard, Compressor and of course my new patchbay. After all the hassle with the SP-12  i decided that it is probably not the best to always put plugs in and out of a machine that´s nearly 25 years old. So the patchbay was the thing to do. They are really cheap nowadays since everybody is using digital mixers and a lot of sidechain equipment is already built in in those mixers. As well multicores are nearly free (8x Stereo TRS - 14,75 €). So now i only have to change the jacks right under my workstation, which is fantastic. The desk itself once again was done with two Expedit Shelves (35 € each), attached to each other with flat steel bars. The only thing i did different this time was to not use the top dividers for the shelf, so it will fit 19" equipment. This works fantastic as you can the and the space remaining holds enough width to fit 9,5" stuff like my soundcard. As well those pieces are used as bottom part for my speakers since they rest on spikes with bases that would fall off moving them withou. The whole thing costed me 85 € which you can´t beat even with material from a hardware store. I as well made me some adapters and long cables, so i can move my active monitors to the desired place for optimal monitoring...

Finally there goes my SP-12 again! I bought this thing on ebay and after it arrived i was thoroughly checking it´s functions for three days. All good and so there was no hesitation on giving 100% positive feedback to the seller. So when the test were done i was working on some beat the other day and out of nothing i couldn't read a thing on the display anymore. The backlight was on, but that was it. Some knocking on the machine helped and i thought it was some soldering point that got lose. First I did not want to get my own hands on the machine, so i brought the SP to some repair dude here in Hannover. Burana works was the place and i gave the guy a written description of the problem. He called me back 2 days later, telling me he did the work i asked him for, but that the display contacts weren't the problem. I picked it right up again and decided that i take a look at it on my own. Opened the machine and there it was: The 14 Pin Cable on the display broke right over some contacts. So i got a friend who was good at soldering to help me and we changed the whole cable. It took us until 4 o'clock in the morning but we were sure having it done. Assembled the machine and guess what: Error! Teh whole machine now froze and the display wasn't working either. After this i was really afraid of having broken the board of the SP and then sent it to Studiorepair in Bad Homburg. I was lucky and Nikolaus Riehm te guy operating studio repair already had an SP-1200 for repairs in his shop so he could cross-check on the machines. After checking both my new display that i ordered from ebay (hard to get these days) and the old one, he assumed that both of them were broke. He then tried one of my displays in the SP-1200 where it worked just fine. After metering the pins on my SP-12 and comparing it to the SP-1200 he found out that the voltage on one of the SP-12 display pins was much higher than on the SP-1200. He tracked back the signal and voila it was the resistor on that circuit whose foot came of from the board. Turned out that this particular resistor was responsible for the dimming and since it didn't dim the voltage the display was working at full glow which made it impossible to see anything. My god was i happy that it wasn't something serious. Niko then fixed my first fader as well which was a little unreliable after all these years (the machine was build Jan. 12th, 1987). So i must say, if you got vintage gear that needs fixing and you are in Germany, talk to this guy, he knows what he does! Cheers Niko! In the video above you´ll find a little beat i just started, sorry for the bad quality, but it was dark and taken with my mobile phone. I´ll upload a audio version while progressing with the track!

Here we go again. I'm still trying to repair my SP-12 i bought off ebay. The issue was the display suddenly not showing any characters anymore which i could locate to the connections of the flat ribbon cable between the mainboard and the display. After a closer check i could see that the cable broke right behind the soldering points. In the pictures you can see a little story on how we exchanged the cable and resoldered the display to the mainboard. This took us several hours but in the end we couldn't help anything with it. The Display still won't show any characters and we have another issue coming up: After powering up, the machine will boot and then after working for a second it will stall and not respond to anything. This could have something to do with the battery which powers the sample RAM, that might have lost it's power over the last 25 years, so I ordered a new one that will arrive this week. Wish me good luck. To be continued...