Hi everyone,

Like the title says, Have you ever come across a broken pitch wheel, or mod wheel, ever tried replacing the Pots (potentiometer) for ur controller, for which the production of spares were discontinued. Which actually means u dont get the whole set.

Well i did, me mentioning here somewhere about planned obsolescence, had me wondering about my old M-audio oxygen 49 Gen 3 controller which i kept aside cauz of the pitch wheel and mod wheel being screwed, also the rotary knobs too, but faders, buttons and keys works perfectly. I liked it a lot mainly bcauz its built quality, only exterior not the stuff inside, i will get to it in a min, i mean i could actually beat someone to death with that, and still it will only be half broken.

So, picked up the controller dusted it, and opened the fucker, pulled out the pots and went on a quest to find the correct one.


Like u see in pic. its B10k as usual but with 68 degree, which means that the resistive material is only pasted from 68 to 180 or so degrees, the resistance or voltage variation starts from 68 and end at 180, and on both ends there are dead zones with nothing, so we get nothing beyond that range. The black paint like layer in the pic. below is the carbon layer which wears out over time.



These are specially made for the product, which means its not commercially available, when the manufacturer discontinues the production of the model, for a few months until stock exists we are screwed. And have to get a new one, just because of the broken pots.

So the quest took me to not finding the correct pot, but ended up picking a normal B10k
which has mostly 300 degree rotation, and the usable range is all over the place, with knurled shaft rather than a solid one.



The problem with the knurled shaft pots is that is made for knobs, so they are a bit tight in movement, so they wont center quickly. But even if i ve gotten a solid shaft pot, the readings wont match cauz 0 ohms corresponds to midi value 0 and 10k to 127. Thats what happened with this one not the readings suit it was tight.



But i had a couple of A10k lying around, which had a solid shaft, so i used/installed them, it centered correctly at 64 but didnt get top and low values.
I got Pitch bend values 13 64 107, (-6528 0 5504) instead of 0 64 127 (-8192 0 8192).
And Mod wheel 0 -72 instead of 0-127

Fortunately there is Midi-Ox, i remapped PB, Mod values to the requirement.
Now it works as its supposed to.
I know A10k, B10k are different one being log and other linear, but in this case it didnt make much of a difference.

The reason i wanted to bring up this here, is to create an awareness of what we actually buy without the knowledge of whats inside, that we have no option of knowing so.
These products are made like toys, even worse. And its going to get worse over the years

This could have been so easy if M audio had used a normal pot, its not so hard, the volts just correspond to a specified value, doesn't necessarily have to be 0 ohms to be 0 midi, it could have been easily been mapped internally. But they did not. Even using an alternative like optical instead of mechanical part could last longer, but they wont and its against their agenda.

Now I have three working keyboard controllers including this a 12 Yo M audio, Just enough to say FU.

I just have to wait until my Roland A500 wears out, it has a joystick, that ll be much fun to work with.

 

Yep and when someone says "How the hell did you come up with that modulation?", you can just tell them "A10k, B10k are different one being log and other linear".