What Would The DX200 Front Panel Look Like If It Was Designed Now?

Modding, modfiying or customising musical equipment is almost as addictive as GAS, the Gear Acquisition Syndrome that many synthesizer 'collectors' suffer from. But in my mind, there are two very different reasons for modifying a piece of music gear: 

Changing (usually enhancing, but not always) what it does or how it does it; 

or 

Making it look different (better, but not always...)

I usually tend to go down the 'Enhancing Functionality' route, and so previous blog posts have covered a variety of mods:

- Roland TR-505

- Yamaha RM1x

- Rebel Technology OWL Pedal

But sometimes, I get a different itch. In this case, it was triggered by two otherwise apparently unconnected things. (Isn't that always the way!)

Thing 1

DJ Tech Tools are a small, DJ-owned DJ-equipment online store (physically located on the West Coast of the US) that also do some things which are much more oriented towards MIDI musicians. The MIDI Fighter 3D and the MIDI Fighter Twister are two MIDI Controllers (one for button mashing (finger drumming), and one for controlling lots of MIDI CCs) that are uncompromisingly professional, are built to withstand serious abuse, and I have both of them! (And I love them and use them all the time!)  They also do very nicely spec'ed audio and USB cables in a variety of bold colours. 

But their creative use of colour goes further than that - they also do Chroma Caps (replacement control knobs in bright colours) and Luma Caps (knobs which glow really nicely!). These are designed for use on stage in poor lighting, where you need to be able to find a specific control knob reliably and quickly. Gear manufacturers love black knobs, and the modern trend for soft rubbery knobs means that I have some examples where the knobs totally vanish in low light! 

One thing that bears repeating about Chroma Caps: Read the 'Technical Details' documentation carefully before ordering! The main diagrams show the view from BELOW the knob, not ABOVE! The first time I ordered I got it wrong, and my knobs were all 180 degrees off...

Anyway, I originally bought some Chroma Caps to replace a knob that had got damaged on a very old piece of Novation gear (I was using it, Officer!), and I really liked them. And late in 2021 I bought some to jazz/pimp up (you can use whatever era's slang you prefer) some of my vintage gear that tends to get used live, and when they asked me for a review, then this got me thinking...

Thing 2

Amplitube are known for their VST audio processing plug-ins (Parent company IK Multimedia does lots of other music stuff as well!). But recently, they have branched out into doing real physical 'boutique' guitar pedals that take the VSTs and make them available to a different audience: guitarists, but also the apparently growing number of synth/modular people who put audio through pedals (I can't help but point the finger at Christian Henson of Spitfire Audio for being a major populariser of this practice, and many other things!) 

The interesting aspect in terms of user interface is that each of the four pedals is colour coded and co-ordinated - but not perfectly. So the X-Space pedal is for reverb, and is blue - except for the display, which is green. The X-Time pedal is for delay, and is green, except for the display, which is orange. The X-Vibe modulation effects pedal is orange, and the display is orange, and the X-Drive distortion/overdrive pedal is red, with a red display. Notice how the X-Gear pedals are almost colour co-ordinated, but not quite...

(You may have also noticed that the photo above is strange... This is because I rotated an image taken at an angle showing the pedals in perspective, and so the viewing position isn't quite where you expect it to be, and so it looks peculiar. If you tilt your head to the left by about 30 degrees, then it should look fine!)

The Mod Proposal

The Yamaha Loop Factory 'desktop' series (the AN200, DX200 and the SU200) are arguably one of the quieter backwaters of Yamaha history. They are the sort of bits of gear which combine some very good features with some unfortunate omissions - and yes, I know that this is just the innate nature of musical gear (in fact, any gear!), particularly at the lower end of the range. But the limited front panel editing, and the complexities of trying to run late 1990s software on modern computers (How about a WebMIDI version, Yamaha, please?), probably put them in the 4 or 5 out of 10 category - although the prices on eBay or Reverb don't seem to reflect this... But I still love them and use them!

Warts and all, the AN200's early Virtual Analogue (VA) synthesis and the DX200's FM synthesis (with a VA Filter!) sound pretty good, even 25 years on, and I figured that live use would be much easier with some Chroma Caps. So here's the AN200 post-capping:

What is really interesting is that the AN200's orange colour-scheme works really well with the large chunky red 7-segment LED display and the little red LEDs, and the orange illuminated buttons.

And then to the DX200:

Oh dear! It seems that for the DX200, the green theme doesn't work at all with the red and orange LEDs. If anything, the green Chroma Caps actually make the orange feel even more wrong! It might have worked in the late 90s, but my modern-influenced eyes looking at the green (especially the rather primary green Chroma Caps - unfortunately DJTT don't do a cyan colour choice!) look at it and find it rather unsettling. 

In fact, it cries out for an aesthetic rework: change the 7-segment displays to green, and change the red and orange LEDs to green (or even an RGB LED with the green and blue LEDs lit!). But that's a huge amount of work! (Ok, so although the main PCB is surface mount, the boards with the LEDs are all thru-hole, but it is still a lot of desoldering on old lead-based solder! And I don't like the look of those soft, probably membrane switches at the bottom...) Assuming that all went well (ho ho), here's what it might look like after a lot of time and effort:

 Which, poor photoshopping apart, makes a huge difference. It now looks 'right'! So in my humble opinion, if Yamaha were designing the DX200 now, they would definitely use green LEDs. 

So, I now face a dilemma. Do I leave it alone, or do I replace the LEDs? (Or do I simply remove the Chroma Caps!) If you thought GAS was bad, then getting colours right when customising vintage gear might be worse!

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Yamaha TX7 Backlit LCD Upgrade

There was a time when 7-segment displays were in fashion:

They were followed by LCDs, which consumed less power and provided more detail in a smaller space. But these early LCDs had a problem - they used ambient light because they didn't have any internal illumination. So they weren't very easy to read in the dark - unlike 7-segment displays. (and for guitar pedals and some other 'need to be visible in the dark' applications, then 7-segment displays are back in fashion!)

The second generation of LCDs had LED backlights, which were often green in the early days, although yellow and red were also possible (red looks very distinctive!). Nowadays you can get green, yellow, red, blue and even white, although LCDs have been, to some extent, superseded by OLEDs, although there is a tendency for OLEDs to be very small, maybe even tiny, in size.

But back to the 1980s, and my TX7. Here's my TX7 as it was:

The TX7 is an interesting device to photograph, because the sloping front panel means that it almost always has a reflection of a window or a ceiling light in it. In the photo above, the only way to avoid this is to take the photo from an angle which is so low that the LCD is being viewed from the wrong angle, and so looks worse that it actually is. But a photo where the LCD is readable also has windows and ceiling lights reflected in it! Modern house building trends, like large windows, skylights and arrays of small LED ceiling lights, just make it worse. Even taken from a crazy angle, there's still a reflection - you can see an edge between the T and the X.

So years of struggling with the TX7's display finally persuaded me to do something about it - and I bought a backlit LCD. There are two types of backlight for LCDs: electro-luminescent panels (several different variants), and LEDs, Electroluminescent panels use a high frequency, high voltage oscillator to light up a panel behind the LCD, and the pale blue 'EL Foil' variety seem to have lives of a few years - so for example, my Kawai K5, Korg Wavestation and Yamaha SY99 all have electroluminescent backlights that no longer work. Replacing these displays (or the inverter electronics, which seem to contain the parts that fail) buys you another few years, and then they die again (my K5, for example). On gear which is already vintage, then the strain of major surgery to replace a display every few years seems like a dangerous gamble...

Notable 'classic' electroluminescent panels were used in the HH IC100 amplifiers in the 1970s. Curiously, the green-blue backlight, which illuminates all of the markings on the rotary controls on the front panels, seems to have a very long life, with many still working...

(Photo of an HH IC100 in the dark by James Davies,  https://www.flickr.com/photos/jamesdavies/14764665183 )

Anyway, I bought a replacement LCD (with a green LED backlight) for the TX7 from Chris at CPMagneticMedia on ebay.co.uk. It arrived very quickly, and was well packaged, bubble-wrapped on the outside, and then that dark reflective anti-static plastic inside. Fitting it was straight-forward: the TX7 needs only a few screws removing to open it up, and the LCD is easily accessible. The small black plastic 'pop rivet' connectors that are used to fasten the LCD onto the mounting brackets are quite fiddly, so here's a quick guide to releasing and installing them if you aren't familiar with how they work.

Releasing the pop rivet is kind of counter-intuitive. You can try to pull out the top of the mushroom part, but it is much easier to just push at the stalk with a small screwdriver and the mushroom part will just pop out.


Installing is the fiddly bit. First, you push the rivet in place, to hold the LC module onto the bracket.

Then you push the mushroom part into place in the round hole side of the rivet:

The mushroom part will lock into place and the sides of the rivet are pushed out slightly, holding the LCD module securely to the metal bracket.

Once the LCD is securely held in the brackets, there's a temptation to over-tighten the screws on the brackets, which the detailed instruction PDF warns you not to do! It was interesting to see that Yamaha had put an empty header with +5 and Ground on the main PCB, which made the backlight power easy to hook up, and I did wonder if Yamaha intended it to be used for a backlit LCD upgrade...

The end result tones with the cyan buttons on the TX7 rather nicely, and it is consistent with many of the 1990s Yamaha LCDs that also used green backlights:

Most importantly, it is now easily readable in high ambient lighting, with reflections, with ceiling lights, and in the dark. Much better, and I wish I had done it a long time ago. If it wasn't for my bad experience with the K5, then I might consider doing it for some of my other vintage synths. (although in general, many 80s synths require quite a lot of disassembly in order to get to the display and replace it, and that can be a lot of work...) Maybe one day...

However, I have to say that recent 'hardware' excursions have rather whetted my appetite for minor updates, and after the TR-505 and TX7, there may soon be additional posts on simple updates to some more of my vintage gear...

Links

HH Electronics on Wikipedia
CPMagneticMedia on ebay.co.uk
Yamaha TX7 on Encyclotronic

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