Post

I can confidently say the CM32L is finally fucking "fixed". It only took me 2 years to like, actually do it. Full story below; it's a whole trip; also explains why it's "fixed" and not fully fixed.

I bought it off Cashies for £100 (iirc) as "fully working" and it was not, in fact, fully working. One of the audio outputs was completely dead. I could've returned it for a full refund but I chose to keep it as they would've just dumped it or sold it for scrapping.

These devices are only getting rarer, after all, so why not try repairing it? I didn't have any knowledge or tools to do this sort of exhaustive troubleshooting. It could just be the pot, it could be a dead component. I just knew the headphone output had the same ailment: a dead right channel.

I foolishly ordered a recap kit off a retailer that sold kits for repairing old devices. In fact, I ordered TWO as for some reason, they shipped the first one to the wrong address and were like, "uh not our fault our systems work fine". I caught it replacing my address the 2nd go around...

I had the kit but no actual equipment to do the job at least safely. I've ordered a "better" soldering station for Christmas last year, and finally decided to sit down not too long ago to do this job. It was excruciating with the tools on hand. It's an awful job but a done job nonetheless.

Some of the through-holes would not clear up no matter how much braid and flux and whatever I threw at it. I gave up and soldered the replaced components as if they were surface mounts. As I was working with lead based solder as well, it didn't take long for my body to react negatively too.

Still, I pushed on, and got it done. At first, it didn't turn on. I was defeated. I was fully ready to just... give up. Sell it for parts, and move on. Thankfully, I noticed that one the caps wasn't soldered properly. I redid that, and it turned on! To my relief.

I quickly rigged a testing environment up, pulled random cables out of my rack to test it, and I've had to fight with FL Studio not recognising some devices... I turned it on. I hooked it up. I played a note. Same fucking symptom as before. The past 5 hours did NO difference whatsoever. "FUCK."

That is definitely NOT what I wanted to see after almost 5 hours straight of work, but I tried to look on the bright side: the unit was recapped, it will last another few decades, potentially. I began to think that MAYBE I should've tested the volume pot first. And, it turns out that WAS the issue!

It was late that day so I chose to stop there and resume another day, turned out to be today. Cracked it back open, and I honestly didn't have a clue where to find a replacement that works, so I decided to bridge the connection points on the board; now it's essentially hardwired to max volume.

What have I learned? I need better tools and a better space to work with this kinda stuff, man. I love the idea of repairing and restoring but I don't have the means or space. I also just need to actually TROUBLESHOOT the damn thing before ordering things left & right.

And, yeah, that's the story of a botched repair that turned right, somehow. Here's a picture of the CM-32L buttoned back up. The volume knob is just how it was sold. It doesn't do anything now, as explained in the earlier posts - it's always at full volume.