Diagnosing Problems With Electronic Keyboard

Video Transcript

"This is Larin Parker with Expert Village! I'm going to talk to you a little bit about diagnosing problems with your audio gear just by listening. Here I have a nineteen sixties Fender Rhodes piano and it's currently not working. One problem though, we turn it on and right away you can hear a good deal of hum coming from the speaker. It's not really a crackle issue or a static issue but you really hear a mmmmm. Ninty percent of the time that problem is going to be due to capacitor problems in the power supply. Hearing that tone, hearing that mmmmm humming rather than static makes me think that probably I need to go to the power supply to fix this. Then the second problem is that sometimes we loud pops when this cable moves around. There we got one! That tells me that there?s some type of loose connection there, that when this is moved mechanically it uncouples something. Then thirdly when I turn the dials here, you can hear a sort of swishing static which is a really common problem for anything that's a little bit older. Really what it needs to fix that problem is just a good cleaning. Those are probably the most common problems that you can diagnose by ear, hum, crackle when you move cables or move connections and that dirty static sound when you turn knobs. That's how we start diagnosing by ear!"