Ensoniqs - I hate them

[Enzo]

We were talking Ensoniq keyboards in another thread. I used to be one of their repair stations. First at a largish music store, then in my own shop. In fact that was my only positive experience with them. When I left the music store, I wrote a detailed letter to Steve Coscia, their service manager. As I recall, he had been a decent fellow, and I believe was trying, but the company was so screwed up... SO I wrote the riot act, spelled out all the various frustrations I had had the previous 8 years working on their stuff. He called me to say he understood, but the company was what it was. he asked what I was going to do, and I said open my own shop. He then asked if I wanted to be one of their service centers at my new shop. Really, I just chewed you out for problems, and you are trying to keep me? BUt I went ahead and signed on. That lasted as long as they did. It was worth the hassle to get the customers coming in.

One issue was they wanted to do everything by board swaps. No matter what, board swap. They made detailed manuals with all these procedures that determined what board a problem was on, then they expected you to order that board. Main CPU board, power supply board, display./control panel board, keybed. If you had something as simple as a busted jack, they wanted you to swap the board. yes, of course I have bags of those Jalco jacks, but that wasn;t the point. You could not, even as a service center, buy even a jack. Bad little tactile switch? New board. Bad Vreg IC, new board. ANyone worth their salt can figure those parts out, but what if you diagnose a bad Curtiss chip? Not hard to do, but you won't find them at the store. and they won;t sell you one. Or a key assigner, or a mask ROM.

SO if they HAVE the boards, you order one, and a few days later I'd have it. SO much for same day service in my shop. They charge my account $500 for the board and pay $400 for the dud. At the store the manager used to come into my shop every so often screaming about the $5000 I owed Ensoniq. I'd have to explain those were charges that would be offset by credits for returns. SO the board costs me $100, E tells us we are to sell the thing for $150. SO I am supposed to tell the customer his simple repair is $150 for the board and keep a straight face.

To clarify, that was after warranty. Warranty repairs were credited the full $500.

But they only had so many boards in stock. If they were all out, you had to wait for duds to come in for them to repair before they could send it out to you. So much for prompt service. Sometimes the boards they sent were bad. More delay. I recall one coming in that had a bad Curtiss chip. So I took one from my old bad board to fix the new board. No thanks to them. And after a while, boards had cycled enough times they were getting shaky. I know I replaced some boards that had intermittent. And I have no doubt some of those boards were marked no problem found and cycled back out. So some other sucker got my intermittent. And I wound up getting new intermittent boards. Thanks...


The manuals were pathetic. Long, involved procedures to find a board swap. On the front it told us we'd need a screwdriver, an allen wrench, and a 100MHz scope. We found that amusing, because the manuals NEVER asked you to scope anything, in fact even the voltage readings were made for kids. It wouldn't just ask us to check the +5 and +15 and -15, it would tell us to put the black probe on pin 5 and the red probe on pin 12 of some connector. Best we could figure for the scope is that if we didn't have one, maybe we were not qualified to be techs... or something. It became shop humor here. One of the guys grabs a screwdriver to take the back off a speaker and someone would say "Don;t forget to take your 100MHz scope."

Little hardware annoyances. Phillips screws mostly, but the top panel was held by 2.5mm allen screws. What was wrong with phillips up there too? And those weird collar nuts for the jacks, not convenient to line up.

Really irked me when they wanted $100 for a collection of schematics for just their oldest models.

But what really got me was handling problems. ANy company looks good when things move along as normal. The measure of a company is how it handles problems. In my entire relationship with that company NOT ONE SINGLE TIME was a problem issue successfully resolved. They'd have accounting telling me I never returned some board, so I owed them $500, and I'd have to copy the UPS delivery record showing someone of such and such name at Ensoniq had signed for it. MOnths later they are still trying to get the $500 off the books. Order one thing, get another, then they ship the right thing, and now i am billed for two things. Orders that are never filled. Months go by, no order comes. We have no record of your order, they say. Then how come I have an order number YOU issued to me? Not one single time.

[bkahuna]

Anybody remember the poly pressure keyboard snafu of the VFX and SD1 models?

Ouch.

The key assemblies had to calibrate themselves at power up, but would start failing after awhile. The keyboard was unusable when this happened.

They kept trying to fix it with firmware upgrades to the key controller, but these were all guesses since they were having a hard time recreating the problem at the factory.

The next suspect was flux residue on the connector between the two key assembly pcbs. You had to remove every key and take the pcbs off to clean the connector pins then reassemble. This worked for awhile, but the problem always came back.

Then it was faulty ribbon cables, then more firmware, and on and on.

I don't recall exactly how many "fixes" they released for this, but it was at least 3 or 4. The problem ended up being the connector between the two key assembly pcbs intermittently losing connection just long enough to freak out the processor. Hard wiring the two connectors together finally solved the problem. So they were on to something when they thought it was flux residue. Fortunately, the final fix was much easier to accomplish than tearing the entire key assembly apart!

I'm sure I fixed dozens of those units over the course of a couple of years.

[Enzo]

Clever lads that we were, we dubbed it the "Poly-problem" keyboard. I referred to it that way while talking to them on the phone once. They found that amusing.

Whenever we had a keyboard issue, we had to order a new keyboard. They expected the old one back, but they did not pay a dud fee on it. SO we stopped returning the duds. as did a lot of other shops. They started to run out of keyboards. I have a lifetime supply of keys now... I think they eventually wised up and paid some sort of bounty, otherwise, why should I incur UPS expense for nothing?

[jrfrond]

This is interesting Doug, because I have MOSTLY positive memories of servicing Ensoniq. It didn't start to suck until the company was in trouble, when they eventually sold out to E-Mu. Yes, it was all module swap, but I don't recall ever waiting. The modules were sent out UPS Blue, and you put the old one back in the box with the prepaid UPS Call Tag on front, and returned it for credit, with the enclosed uber-simple warranty claim. Customer service, under Steve Coscia (whom I still keep in touch with) was nearly flawless, as was technical help under Steve Pretti, who also wrote the manuals. Sure, I wanted schematics just like the next guy, but the system DID work until there was a financial wrench in the works. I also went to their factory in PA for training, and it was one of the nicest, cleanest facilities I'd ever seen. I've found that, occasionally, gripes with mfrs. are regional. Why this is, I do not know.

[Enzo]

Well, I am glad your experience was more positive than mine, John. But for me it was as described. It sailed along fine until there was a problem. I did run into board shortages, and as time went on, boards came in with problems. I couldn't say about it being regional, I was never in touch with other Ensoniq shops in the region.

Coincidently, I just got a call a few minutes ago from a customer who had dropped off three SQ-2 keyboards wanting me to make one good one from the three dead ones if possible. I made two good ones. They have been waiting here since winter. A family member will be passing through Lansing today and will pick them up. It's a fat ticket too, so I'm happy.

I ran into my former business partner and his dad the other day. He started out as my junior tech years earlier. We recalled his first day on the job, where I said "Congratulations, you are now the new Ensoniq expert." It didn;t take long for the irony to sink in: you didn't need to know anything to do the diagnostics.