Korg EMX-1 Opinions

Maybe next year we’ll be treated to a boutique version of the EMX with tiny buttons, half the voices and a fake plastic valve that lights up. :smiley:

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Maybe if Electribes had been Rolands…

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Exactly. :smiley:

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Anyone ever swapped-out their tubes? I seem to remember that owners were finding better sounding matched pairs…?

Never really liked the sound of the stock tubes myself.

My ESX1 tubes do need swapping out at some point…

Get an Electribe 2 blue instead. Much cheaper and con get pretty similar to it :wink: it is just such and underrated tool that can work wonders in the right hands ^^

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Man I love my ESX-1 but I haven’t turned it on in years, as most of the buttons have stopped responding. Wish I could get it fixed, because second hand prices are unreasonable af

I got replacements for my ESX-1 from hotroxuk.com who sold them as matched pairs. That was in 2010 though so no idea if they even still exist.

They sounded nice to me, but not a huge difference. Could well have been my imagination. I never did a blind test to compare them, so the ones I paid extra for were always going to sound better, right?!

Edit: looking through my old emails, looks like I got a pair of ECC803 Tungsol Gold Pin:

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I did this twice when I still had my EMX-1 around 10 years ago. Once with the Tungsol mentioned by PofM. The other tubes were JJ EC83S. But honestly I could not really hear a real difference to the stock ones

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When I used to have an EMX some of the buttons stopped working as well. Opened it up and I found that the capacitive layer had worn out. What I did to repair it was to grind some pencil (without the would off course) to fine powder. I mixed the ground pencil with some second glue and applied it to the worn off capacitive layer. On top of the glue I added some more pencil powder. Let it dry and sanded it with some gritty paper (not sand paper, but gritty paper for writing) so none of the ground pencil could become loose and do damage to the board.
And no issues for years to come. Try at your own discretion…

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You can still find them minty

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Anybody know how to fix a jittery main encoder?

Spray some cleaner down the shaft worked for me

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With an SD drive, no less! Holy moley!

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Spraying with contact cleaner can work. Sometimes it fixes it, sometimes only temporarily.

If the jitter persists, it’s not hard to open up the deck and put a sheet of baking parchment (NOT WAX PAPER! or you could get melted wax all over your board) between the two big circuitboards, to keep them from touching.

Instructions and photos of which order to take out the screws here.

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Cai-Kote works well. You can also use a circuit writer pen.

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What’s the little box to (Phara’s) left of the EMX? FX unit? Compressor? I’ve seen it before somewhere but can’t place it…

OTO Boum.

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That’s basically the only thing he added since the one he did the year before.

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I swapped my ESX’s tubes out with some JJ ones.

I’m not sure if they sound cleaner or I’m just imagining a difference . . FWIW, to me it does sound cleaner, and I’m also 99% sure I’m imagining it.

Or maybe the tubes aren’t important and it just sounds better because it’s been cleaned and recalibrated now.

It was a fun afternoon project, though. And it’s handy to have made the testing cable if you ever need to run a calibration/self-test again.

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I changed the tubes in my ESX1, couldn’t hear any difference at all.

So I left the EMX1 tubes as stock.

Should not have sold them. Ah well.

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