Well, thanks to Bradley/Synth80s (and my friend Ed, for helping me
get it up the stairs), I am once again a CS-80 owner! The tolex is
a little bit rough and the keyboard needs a bit of work, but the
panel/knobs look and work great and the tuning is perfect.
Now I have to decide how much restoration and/or modification I want
to do to it. At the minimum I'll fix up the keyboard, clean up some
cosmetics, and add Crow's fixes to the CMOS boards (bypass caps,
etc).
At the other extreme is to gut all electronics between the
knobs/keyboard and the voice cards, replacing it all with a CPU/FPGA
based board to have MIDI, CV/Gate I/O, programmable presets (like
Prophet 5/OBX), voice assignment/unision modes, multi-timbral, auto-
tune, and split into two (three with power supply?) cabinets so one
person can move it.
I'm an electrical engineer and have some woodworking skills
(including portabilizing a couple of Hammond organs), so it's all
possible if I have the time and energy.
I'm going to take quite some time planning, deciding, and just
playing, before I do anything drastic. I'll be running some of
these ideas in detail in the mods thread, but if there are other
CS80 owners interested in massive rebuilds/mods, let me know,
especially if you have engineering, firmware, or cabinet-making
skills (hi Crow & Kent!). It would great to come up with a common
set of mods and split the development effort.
Much more later,
David
