Line 6 Echo Park MYSTERY?

[scr@tchy]

Hi there,
My friend's battery clip in his Echo Park broke off and since I am relatively good with soldering I put on a new one. It went without mishap, I clipped the old one off with about 2 inches of lead left before it got to the board. I soldered the new one on, melted the heat shrink tubing into place, tied a stop knot, put the pedal back together. Only now the pedal has some problems:

1- No sound, even bypassed.
2- When you depress the pedal, it doesn't turn on, BUT if you hold the pedal down a green LED flashes. It quits once you let the pedal up. The speed of the LED flashes are not effected by turning the knobs.

The pedal wasn't dropped during my simple procedure, anyone have an idea what's happening here?

[cbarrow7625]

Battery Clip wired in backwards? With aresult like that I wouldn't simply trust the wire colors, who knows what the manufacturer actually used. If you still have the old one double check that your + and their + from the battery go to the same wire into the unit. (i.e., is theirs backwards from normal for soem stupid reason?)

Check to make sure a solder joint or wire from the battery clip didn't inadvertently break on the PC board due to being handled as well.

[Jag]

Are you sure the battery is good?

[Mark Hammer]

If the repair involved "grafting" a battery snap on, then I'm assuming you soldered red to red and black to black, so there should be no risk of reverse power. Low battery would result in a red LED flashing. I'm concerned that you may have inadvertently damaged something via static during the repair. Not a given that you did, but the behaviour is definitely weird.

What does it do if you power it with a wallwart?

[Steve Conner]

I have an Echo Park, and I've never seen it do anything like that ever I'd expect a pricey digital stomp box like this to have reverse polarity and static protection, too.

I apologize if I'm insulting your intelligence, but you did insulate the two solder joints from each other, right? And you're testing it with a battery that you know is fresh? The Echo Park draws a lot of current, and an old battery might not be able to hack it, even if it was working in the pedal you borrowed it out of.

Also, my Echo Park has a black mystery button of some sort on the back, maybe it's a reset button? Then again, maybe it's not even a button at all, if anyone knows, Mark Hammer will.

[Mark Hammer]

Ah, the famous "black button".

here's how it works. You will note there are two Allen screws adjacent to the black button. Unscrew them, fully depress the button, and see what happens.

POP! The module springs up for easy removal. In fact, the dock is designed to be fully compatible with all the modules. Some places will sell the modules individually, such that you can swap them out. If the dock is stereo, but the module appears to originally come in a mono dock, it will still work. The reverse is true too. My guess is this was partly inspired by the observation from some users that the EPROM in the larger modeller pedals could be swapped for the EPROM in another, and the pedal would now function like the new EPROM (albeit with the legending from the original pedal on the chassis to confuse you). What Line 6 did was stick all the legending, and the EPROM ("personality"), into a little inexpensive plastic module whose removal and replacement would have very little risk or inconvenience associated with it. I have all the Tone Cores, except for the Constrictor, and quite frankly I cannot recall which module came in which dock, because they have been swapped around so much. Having the legending and control complement in the module itself makes that all possible.

Jeorge Tripps turned me on to a cute little "easter egg" in the Otto Filter when plugged into a stereo dock. There is a filter mode indicated as "TF" (which can stand for talking filter or twin filter). This produces a nice vocal sound by countersweeping two bandpass filters. In mono, it just sound vocally. In a stereo dock, each filter is assigned to a different output, such that when you listen to the sweep in stereo, it moves across the field. Neat!

L6 had plans to invite 3rd party developers to devise modules for what I suspect wold have been unusual or less-often used effects. For instance, while not that many players would spring $150-180 for a ring modulator (since you don't really use it that much), they might be more favourable to a $50 module with RM effects that could be plugged in when wanted. Same for perhaps an octave-divider or bit crusher, or whatnot.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on your perspective, Jeorge "Mr. Huge" Tripps, who had been serving as project manager for the Tone Core series, got an offer he could not refuse from Dunlop, and jumped ship to resurrect the Way Huge line, with their support. That kind of put the 3rd-party module initiative on blocks. Then, several months ago, L6 announced the availability of a development kit for producing 3rd party modules for the Tone Series: http://namm.harmony-central.com/WNAM...loper-Kit.html

So, to quote Monty Python: "Not quite dead yet".

[Steve Conner]

OMG, I think I may just have had a nerdgasm

[Anja Köhler]

Nice Line 6 POD

Hi, I find the "Line 6 POD 2.0" is very remarkably, especially the overdriven channel and it's cheap.

I recommend:
http://www.neue-musik-laden.de/Effek...D-20::119.html

See you

Anja