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Hello,

I am new owner of the Roland FP-8. Piano is good in every respect, keybed is perfect, 5 piano sounds are very usable. One thing bugs me though, piano is not loud enough via built in speakers. Loudness is barely enough for a small room ( volume regulator is at max ). The same is for headset, volume is just enough when slider is at max. What I noticed is that volume gradually raises through the practice session. Say, after one hour I need to reduce volume to its 80% mark to stay at the same level in the headset.

I connected my iPod ( iPod volume was at 20% mark ) to Line-in and got very loud sound while piano slider was only at 30% of the volume.

Question to FP-8 owners: What is the sound level in your piano?

Thanks, qwert.

Congrat on your FP8. I have 2 of them and consider them the best built DP Roland has ever sold. I never had volume issues with them; broken hammers on a few keys but they are cheap. I use a sub-woofer on the mono line out and thats all. Plenty of volume on the built ins. I would look around for a Roland keyboard guy and have them listen to it. Tne slider may need cleaning. Those Pianos are 20yr old.

Thank you for the info! I check it out.

What is the sound level in your piano?

You have a sound level meter? Do you want us to measure the sound pressure in decibels and then report back to you?

Update.

Problem is solved. 2 capacitors on the main board ( C41 and C49 ) were bad. I replaced them and my piano has normal loudness back. Comfortable level is around quarter of the Master Volume slider.

Thank you krzyzowski again for info.
qwert

Qwert,

Hello, I'm interested to know anything you can share about your FP-8 repair. I've got an FP-8 (love it), but it is starting to get static on output and eventually gets quiet like you describe or cuts out entirely.

I'd be interested to understand how you identified the bad caps, how you got them unsoldered (I looked at my board and the caps are surface mount), etc.

With thanks,
Rob

I'm not Quert, but can say That my FP had the same problem and it is a minor repair, however, I had a local Roland keyboard guy do it because they know what to replace. Said it was bad caps also, but to me it sounded like failing outputs. I have years of experience repairing audio equip, but still paid the Roland guy. Repair was under $100.

The classic method to re-work surface mount is a hot air system but something as simple as a cap can be un-soldered with a fine tip solder iron. Heat each end alternately then pull the part off with tweezers. In a way surface mount parts are easier to work on because you do all the work from one side. To find the defect the normal method is to inject a signal at the input of the amp and then follow it stage by stage until you find a problem but an experienced repair tech might just suspect a 20 year old electrolytic cap might be the problem and as they only cost a few cents may as well replace them.

Hi.
Do what ChrisA said. That how I did it. Thanks Chris, spot on.

( I have FP-8 schematics and this is 80% of success )

Nearly forgot.
To confirm that caps are bad you could connect audio player to LINE-IN connector at the back ( put the volume slider to minimum ). If you hear loud sound - caps are bad. If volume is still low - caps are good.

qwert,

Could you share the schematics? I'm pretty sure I've got the same problem and I'd like to be able to trace the circuit as I go to be sure.

R

See PM.
If you want to be sure do a little test I mentioned above ( with audio player connected to line in input).

I definitely have the loud input problem to line in. I connected a metronome and almost blew the speakers with line volume at about 10%.

( I told you to put the volume down )

yes, your problem is the same as mine. Change caps and enjoy.
qwert

Qwert - would you mind sharing those FP-8 schematics? I would greatly appreciate any help. I have the exact same problem, and when I opened it up I can see the caps, but to have the correct values would be great. Did you order them from Digikey? Thanks in advance! intoabyss at live.com

Hi.
Value is 10M/16V for both. I bought them from the nearest shop and they are in a different form factor.

br, qwert.

I just did the cap replacement and it works as advertized.

Took me a while to build up the courage to tear my keyboard apart and make the capacitor replacement repair. I can definitely confirm that many of the caps had leaked. Most just onto the pads under the caps so not really visible until I got the old caps off, but two were so bad that the electrolytic had spilled out onto the PCB and made visible corrosion marks on the board.

I finished up last night and everything seems to have worked swimmingly. I went ahead and replaced all the caps on the board. There were 11 I think. Like 6 - 10uf, 4 - 47uf, and 1 - 100uf if I recall.

As it stands, I have a 100% keyboard again and I'm really happy.

R

Hi all,

thanks for the precious information on this thread. It helped me to bring my venerable FP8 back to life.

I quickly found a pdf of the repair manual online and started to check the coupling capacitors C41 and C49. It finally turned out that all the smd capacitors on the main board had leaked and needed replacment. The major problem was cleaning the leaked electrolyte. Incomplete cleaning makes re-soldering nearly impossible. There are many helpful youtube videos on unsoldering, cleaning and resoldering this type of capacitors out there.

After replacement the piano still didn't work properly. With some more searching I found that leaked electrolyte and maybe the heat from desoldering and soldering had damaged one of the through-contacts (little holes) between the front and back side of the pcb. After soldering a small piece of wire (leg of resistor) across the hole to re-connect the tracks on the front and back side it came back working normally.

C41 and C49 in the repair manual...:


Left to right: C49,C41,C37, C50:


Not a beautiful repair, but working. The feedthrough resistor wire leg repair can be seen above C41 on the left right close to connector CN9 (here labelled 1).

I found the capacitors with correct dimensions at radiospares-France (come in packs of 5), here are the references:

10/16 dimension B: ref 537-0742
47/16 dimension D: ref 537-0180
100/6.3 dimension D: ref 569-203

There is still some weak whizzing sound at the end of the decay of the notes of the piano sounds remaining. It was always there from the beginning and gets a little less after warming up. I suppose its the D/A MSB adjustment of VR1 and VR2, but don't know yet for sure.

my88keys

Hello, my88keys, I am new to this forum, and really appreciate your sharing your bad cap replacement experience. My FP-8 is now working again, but the "Whirring Sound" during the decay is driving me nutz. I am guessing that it is a filter cap somewhere. The frequency of the "whizzing" on mine differs with which note(s) are being held. I think it is having a negative effect on the quality of sound when playing as well.
Have you found this trouble?
I have figured out that I have a later revision main board in my FP-8, and there are no VR1 or VR2. My board number ends in 2002, while the manual I downloaded ends in 2000. Guess it is time for another schematic search.
Thanks!
Danmookie

Found it! Unfortunately, I am not sure what fixed the "Whizzing" sound on decay, but here is what I did.

I pulled the main board and gave it a bath in Isopropyl Alcohol and used a toothbrush to remove some electrolyte I had missed. On reassembly, I was quite a bit more careful with routing the wires to the connectors. I used the metal cable wraps mounted to the boards to move the wires further away from the boards. My intuition suggests that the wire routing is what solved the problem. This would be a good thing to try first, as it is quite easy to do without pulling the board.

While I was in there, I tested some of the pass through holes on the board, and found that not all of them are connected through. An example would be the left and right outputs on CN1. The pass through is to ground, and that would not help with the output...

Danmookie