Yamaha Electone D80

[Markus Haverkamp]

Hello,

I recently bought a Yamaha Electone D80 organ which might already be some 30 years old. (As a child my organ teacher in Germany had a similar model, and my heart felt an irresistible urge to click the "buy" button when I saw it for $1 on eBay, and suddenly it was mine.)

The organ works, however, has quite some back-ground noise (i.e. a "tschhhhh..." sound) which increases when turning up the volume. I opened the organ, and it's astonishingly clean with a only tiny bit of dust in some places. Does anybody know where the "tschhh…" sound might come from and how I could fix it?

Apart from that the organ has three keyboards. The tune of the solo and upper keyboard however is misaligned by half a note. E.g. C sharp on the solo keyboard is C on the upper keyboard. The solo key board has a tuner which however even increases the misalignment. Does anybody know what could be the reason for this and how this can be corrected?

Many thanks and best regards from Australia,

Markus

[andyg]

Make that 40+ years old, as it's a 1977 model.

Noisy tone generators? Noise gate issues? Noisy amps? Power supply issues? Hard to diagnose from a distance. Power supply is where I'd probably start, making sure that the correct voltages are getting where they should. You'd need some basic test gear for that and the skills to use them, plus a copy of the schematics. You can enquire about those in the dedicated section of the forum. If you need to buy them, they will probably cost more than the organ is worth, though.

As for the synth keyboard being out of tune, again, I'd be thinking that it might be power supply issues. The D80 is so old, I can't remember if it uses Yamaha's PASS system for tone generation throughout or partially. If the latter, then the synth might be entirely analogue and they can drift off tune - there's usually an internal adjustment for this. See if you can find a tuning pot on the synth board.

[tucsondave]

For the tuning, there is an adjustment (VR1) on the SM board.
For the noise first check to see if any panel controls affect it.

td

[Markus Haverkamp]

Many thanks Andy