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Hi Everyone, Initially I was just going to ask for a part number and source (in the US) for an Xpander battery. I don't remember when I replaced mine last, but I'm sure it was over 10 years ago. When I replace it this time, I'm going to put a label on the battery with the date of replacement. So please, someone send me that information. The battery seems to be holding up ok, the patches are still intact, and there is no sign of leakage (which is more important). Does the battery also back up any calibration info like it does on the OB8? While I had the cover open, I decided to go through the Test & Cal procedure in the Service Manual. All of the voltages look good, but I did SKIP the the A to D Converter Calibration and the B Audio Method on page 35, since I don't have anything with CVouts, and don't plan on using CV to trigger the Xpander. Problem #1: When I did the Tune All on the Tune Page, everything failed, so I would appreciate some direction isolating these problems. Problem #2: Some of the buttons don't respond on the first press. I'm hoping this is just dirty switch contacts as opposed to anything electronic. Can these contacts be cleaned with deoxit (or similar) or do the switches need to be replaced? I have a few spares. FWIW, my Xpander is made in the USA and has a "228" on the voice board. Does anyone know how many Xpanders were actually produced? I do have a handful of spare CEMs, but I don't remember which ones and I would need to find them if I need to replace any. I was thinking about carefully reseating the voice chips because my Xapnder has been sitting unused for so long. chances are the pins may have oxidized. Thanks for your help. Tony
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Oberheim Xpander Clone In the Works...
3
Hello Guys, Just spotted this on matrixsynth. Amazing news ! https://www.matrixsynth.com/2025/02/acme-xp60-oberheim-xpander-clone-in.html regards,
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Xpander Filter / Res tune Fail - noisy output
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Hello everyone, Just posting an update that this problem has been solved thanks to the tips here. Scoping the signals revealed that the 330pF Mica cap on the vcf IC pin 1 (cell 4), Cx43 had the burbling noise signal on the bad voice when the other voices did not. Took a while to get the silver mica cap but that solved the issue. All tuning up nicely and sounding sweet. Thanks again to all of you for all the tips and knowledge. Ed
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Xpander Filter / Res tune Fail - noisy output
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Hi everyone, I'm having a hard time finding what the fault is on voice 3 of my Xpander. The volume jumps on this voice (can be up or down) and it crackles and is noisy with the filter down, filter open it passes the osc signal but still has degraded audio. i've swapped most chips to do with the filter with an adjacent voice and the problem remains on voice 3. The electrolytic caps are new but still replaced the cx47,48 and the problem is the same. Cleaned the chip leads and still the same. I read a previous message about cleaning the Ic sockets with a fiberglass pen, could that really be the problem? Bad solder joint perhaps cause this sort of problem? It sounds like something major is messing up the sound when the filter is closed causing crackling and loud noise instead of a tone. With the filter open the audio sounds degraded but recognizable. Does anyone have any suggestions? Studying the schematics now to see what it could be, thinking maybe the ceramic caps or perhaps a bad resistor? Thanks, Ed
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Dear all, The Xplorer editor is now open source and available on Github: https://github.com/xplorer2716/XplorerEditor/ Almost everything is explained in the readme file https://github.com/xplorer2716/XplorerEditor?tab=readme-ov-file#readme, so I won't duplicate the information here. Sadly I have no time to develop new features since years, you know how real life is. Now anybody can grab the source and continue the journey. I hope this will help Xpanders/Matrix-12 owners to get the best of their beloved synths. This is my humble contribution to the community :) IMHO, the best thing to do with the source code would be to migrate the it to a perennial framework such as JUCE, so any users could run it on Windows/Mac/Linux, whatever the underlying architecture is (Intel, ARM, etc...). This is not a simple task, mostly regarding UI. The latest release is available here: https://github.com/xplorer2716/XplorerEditor/releases/tag/v2024.8.2.1 BTW, I put a copy into the Files section of the xpantastic group. Cheers,
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Orbital Interview mentions Xpander
https://theretrohour.com/orbital-paul-hartnoll-on-rave-culture-video-game-music-the-retro-hour-ep431/ Mentions Xpander at one point, not sure exactly what time period. Basically, he says it's one of the synths he won't sell because he needs it for live gigs and remaking old tracks. Jeremy.
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I'm just getting back into my synths after decades. I can't seem to get Xplorer to work with the Matrix-12. I've got a mioXL MIDI interface. I've read the Xplorer manual and tried for hours to figure out what I'm missing. I've also tried using LoopBe1. Matrix-12 1 is what shows up in my mioXL interface. I've selected that for "Output port to synthesizer" and also for the Input port. I've got the Matrix-12 on MIDI ch. 12, and my Fatar keyboard is able to play the synth using ch. 12. I'd be quite grateful for any suggestions. - Rob
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Xpander sysex patch format
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Hello Tony; a couple of quick observations: The words "packed/unpacked" are not ideal to describe what happens here. Internally all Synths of that era naturally used 8 bit for storage and parameter resolution. However SysEx can only transfer 7 bit per byte meaning that the internal data needs to be encoded for transfers. There are various schemes for doing this; and it appears to me that the Xpander uses something like 7 bits followed by the remaining highest bit (I'd have to doublecheck if this is ineed the case). This would explain why you see 16 bytes for the name instead of 8 bytes: the byte containing the character itself followed by the byte containing the missing highest bit (which if of course empty). This would also have consequences for the other (data) bytes. In general an editor would decode the dump back to its native 8 bit format because then all the values become clearly visible. The difference in bank files sizes is indeed most likely due to the dumps containing multis and/or globals. The difference in calculated size between 100 single patches and a whole bank is likely due to the fact that the SysEx header and EOX byte are only used once for the bank dump instead of 100 times. I'd have to look all this up in detail; but about 25 years ago I also spoke SysEx fluently (I was part of a team that wrote lots of SysEx librarians/editors).
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File /Documents/Xpander_System_Exclusive_Codes_and_Multi_Patch_Data_Format.pdf uploaded
#file-notice
The following files and folders have been uploaded to the Files area of the [email protected] group. /Documents/Xpander_System_Exclusive_Codes_and_Multi_Patch_Data_Format.pdf By: TC <cappy2112@...> Description: Very detailed Sysex Spec, not the one usually found everywhere else. This spec includes all of the sysex commands used for remote editing patches, the Xpander Single AND Multi-Patch data formats. This is the only document I've seen that contains the Multi-Patch data format for the Xpander (The Matrix-12 Multi-patch format is different)
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Hello Everyone, I wonder if anybody could help me?! I recently fitted a battery holder for a CR123 3v lithium battery for the memory back up. In the space of a couple of months one battery has already gone flat and another seems to be losing around 0.1V per 24 hours. My question is, is this because the Duracell CR123 battery isn't somehow as stealthy as the Panasonic original? or is there some problem in the backup circuit, i.e a capacitor acting as a reservoir to slow the flow of voltage? or something completely different? Any help would be appreciated! Cheers Paul
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MusicTrack JP Xpander Overview/Demo incoming..
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Jop3xMvatYA When the full vid drops, 'realtime translation' subtitles should be available. Use the options for Subtitles, select AUTO TRANSLATE as the language etc.
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Discussion about price development
6
You may want to review or add more items in the Photos and Files folders on the left menu: /g/xpantastic/photos /g/xpantastic/files Or just continue discussing the Xpantastic! Price Upgrade here. Ref. /g/xpantastic/album?id=281469
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...
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I paid 2800,- for an M12 and sold it by 5000,- around 10 years later, because I was worried about the components getting old. In any case, I was sure that prices would still continue rising although not this much. It is interesting to see what will be the peak 10 years from now. 5000,- for an Xpander today feels not too much in comparison. Quite the contrary, as PeWe pointed out!
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Photo Vemia_20221109_Ober.png uploaded
#photo-notice
The following photos have been uploaded to the Xpantastic! Price Upgrade album of the [email protected] group. Vemia_20221109_Ober.png By: Tim, EI4GNB <ei4gnb@...>
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re-seating IC's
9
Hi, I'm posting to share some of my experiences in case they are of use to others. I own a US-made Xpander for about 6 years now. It seems that once every few years I see issues where the Xpander crashes or fails to boot. Every time I have been able to "fix" this by re-seating the ROM IC's on the processor board. By re-seating I mean pulling the ROMs from their sockets and putting them back in. Folklore has it that this helps scrape corrosion from the IC pins and/or the sockets. I just went through this procedure again but this time I experienced a new problem: after re-seating the main processor ROMs, the menu was working fine again but there was no sound. I was also unable to tune the synth; it would hang on VCO 1. I tried the VMEM test and this hung on "TESTING" (which is supposed to take less than 20 seconds). There are also two ROMs and one RAM on the voice board. Because the hanging VMEM test pointed to those IC's, I re-seated them. This restored normal operation: sound is back, tuning passes. Does this sound familiar to anyone? Re-seating IC's does not feel like a proper fix to me but it's very little effort and the problem does not happen enough to make me want to spend more time on it. Cheers, Jacob
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A request to Xpander owners
Hello Everyone, I'm working on a program which will decode the Xpander cassette dump format and save that data as sysex. I'm doing this just for fun, not that there is any pressing need for it. My Xpander is on the fritz, and I think the cassette circuit is outputting some garbage. I would like to ask those who have physical Xpanders (as opposed to soft synths and Matrix 12s) to send me a cassette dump as a wave file, along with a sysex dump. Please save the wave file in mono, 16-bit, and 48,000 Hz sample rate. (These are easily done in Audacity, and I'm sure in your favorite audio editor) . I would also like to suggest zipping cassette.wav and sysex.dat and use your name for the zip file, so that I can get back to the owner If needed. Once I am able to decode the cassette format, I need to compare it to the sysex dump. This is why I'm asking for a "matching pair" from a few Xpander owners. Even if you only have the crappy Factory patches, I need the cassette dump & the sysex dump from the same machine. The more "pairs of patch files" I get from Xpander owners, the better I will be able to test my program. I'm sure there will be level & noise differences from various Xpanders, this will be useful for my testing. Eventually I would like to write the complementary program which takes a sysex dump and generates the cassette dump (although this will be more difficult). Who knows, I may get around to trying this for a Matrix 12 too (but I only have an Xpander). Thanks for your cooperation& assistance. tony
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Matrix 12 battery replacement
4
Hi folks just a quick question, I have a replacement Panasonic br-2/3v battery on its way for my Matrix-12, How easy are these to replace? ive managed to remove the old battery... the legs on the replacement are a fair bit longer so i may have to trim them...no problem there but regarding the legs themselves, do they have to travel through the pcb board for proper connection or can they just be soldered to the terminals on the processor board, the drill holes in the pcb for the battery are really tiny, smaller than usual... and im not sure if the pins would fit through, The older battery was soldered either side of the pcb but not both... ! any thoughts? if its too fiddly i might just get a local tech to have a look, my eyes aren't as good as they used to be. Thanks again folks Dave Campbell q: /
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Removing the Xpander battery
2
Hi , I don't remember when I last replaced the battery in my Xpander, and I wasn't smart enough to write the replacement date near the battery. I'm thinking about just cutting the leads for now, until I have time to solder in a new one. If I do that, do I need to go through a calibration procedure like on the OB8, or just do autotune and cross my fingers? I know I'll lose the patches, I have them backed up already. Thanks Tony
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Xpanding my horizon
21
Hi all, I just subscribed to this groups, and thought I might introduce myself. I have loved synthesizers for as long as I can remember (all the way back into the 1970s...). I make music with synths, repair them, and even build some. The Xpander and Matrix-12 are facinating instruments, and I have just gotten a Matrix-12 in for service, so finally I can take the time to learn more about these instruments. It has all the usual errors; one key broken, one rotary encoder mailfunctoning, auto- tune turns out the usual errors, but apart form that is seems to be mostly in order. More about me, my music, gear and all that at: http://www.wintherstormer.no/ Terje Winther terje.winther@... http://www.wintherstormer.no/
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Matrix-12 Service Routine Questions
8
(1) With UNTUNE VCOs of lower voice board sound about one octave (1.2 Volts) lower than VCOs of upper board. Are there different default values for lower and upper boards? Same O.S. installed on both boards. (2) DAC OFFSET service routine only works with lower voice board. How to adjust DAC offset on upper voice board? (3) Coding jumper decides which board is "upper", which is "lower". Is it possible simply by way of swapping jumpers to make upper to lower and vice versa? Many thanks for help and insights!
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Sat 8:39am