The 10 Greatest Synths Of All Time

[nickamandote]

Wrong! Where is the Yamaha TX81Z? The Lately bass preset changed dance music for sure

[JCJR]

No Memorymoog....

Which might deserve mention in both "the ten greatest" and also "the ten least reliable" lists. Or maybe "the ten highest-maintenance" or whatever.

My Memorymoog was completely reliable and never needed maintenance during the 14 years I owned it.
I will say I worked in music stores during the 80's/90's and the most unreliable and most needed repairs for synths title more appropriately belonged to Sequential Circuits and Ensoniq.

I've read that some of the factory MemoryMoogs were very stable. But many were not. Certainly my pre-midi MemoryMoog was not stable.

Nothing ever failed on my MemoryMoog. It always worked. But it kept falling out of tune and after a couple of years I had to open it up and recalibrate as often as once a week to get all 6 voices to auto tune. So more of a maintenance headache than a repair headache. But it would have been 100 percent reliable if I didn't care about whether it would play in-tune!

I did several of the "original Moog company" hardware updates that were supposed to help, but never seemed to make much diff. One of the last things I tried was to replace all the voice tuning trimmer resistors with 10-turn resistors hoping that it would allow more precise adjustment to get into the auto-tune capture range. Can't recall if that helped much or at all.

Fairly near when the original Moog company finally went out of business, I was talking on the phone with one of the Moog guys (probably about a product review I was writing or maybe just shooting the breeze). Can't recall if I still had the MemoryMoog, or if I still had it but had about given up-- The guy told me that some of the production runs had used water-soluble flux, and the boards had not been sufficiently washed. Leaving thin films of flux residue not easily visible on the boards. And that this flux residue was one cause of the instability.

Am purt certain I never tried to wash my boards, but maybe so, can't recall. With VCO circuits, any residue on the board that tends to act like a resistor or capacitor can mess up the VCO performance. Maybe water-soluble flux residue could make a "weather-dependent" instability, dunno. Maybe mine had insufficiently washed boards or maybe not. It was frustrating because all the MemoryMoog components and boards were top-notch quality and beautiful to behold, to have an axe that wouldn't stay in tune. Wheras some of the Korg, Roland and Yamaha instruments of the time used paper or phenolic boards and ugly generic components and were stable as hell in spite of the ugly cheap appearance of the innards.