Before sending my Axe II back to support I seek peanut gallery suggestions-midi

[zentman]

I did contact support and a ticket has been open. They were very quick to respond I am pleased to report. That being typed, before I go without my Axe, I seek ideas from the forum. By the process of elimination and logical deduction, I am pretty sure my Axe midi in jack is jacked. Every month or two it stops working unless I go to the midi plug and work the pins in and out after spraying them with tuner cleaner. It seems to rectify the problem and yet it returns. Seems to me if there was oxidation on the midi input it wouldn't come back so fast.

I peaked inside and saw the little midi jack but that told me nothing as it looked fine. I would suspect a short in it somewhere or bad solder connection but it doesn't shut down or glitch when you move the midi plug in and around.

Has anyone experienced this? I have tried 3 midi cables and 2 different midi controllers to rule those possibilities out already. The unit is 4 years old.

 

[Bruce1448]

I've personally never experienced this with my Mark I (about 3 years old).

I used both 5 and 7 pin cables without having anything like you mentioned...Sounds like something isn't right somewhere to me.

 

[Patzag]

The midi ports re usually soldered to the board. Most likely one of the pins has a cold solder (or there's something jammed inside that causes the trouble). If you're adventurous, you can try resoldering the pins to the board to ensure proper contact.

 

[Sixstring]

Sounds like a cold solder joint to me or it was week and has been broke from normal use, which reenforces the use of a patch panel if you are continually plugging and un plugging for setup and teardown.

 

[Rex]

You've tried a different cable, right?

There could be a bit of lint or some other crud jammed into one of the jack contacts.


A bad solder joint is a possibility, but pretty rare with commercial, wave-soldered PC boards.

 

[zentman]

I have decided to send it back. It will be much more costly than having a local guy fix it but at least I know the guys who built the thing won't mess anything else up while they are in there. I'm going to have to play live with a RP500 now.