The Wurly of My Dreams

(12/18) That would be my Wurlitzer 200A electronic piano, in a dream state more than a few years, and which I totally failed to wake-up. (But you can skip this tawdry introductory tripe, gentle reader, and go directly to the tawdry towering denouement.)

... My beloved Yamaha DGX500 has a perfectly adequate supply of “electric piano” sounds, infinitely superior to the poor broken wurly. But I am driven by guilt / despair / relentless duty to repair the 200A (1.) because I thought I broke it (didn’t really) and (2.) because it is a family heirloom, passed down in sacred trust and/or blind neglect by my departed parental units. ... My mother apparently would tinkle away on it, until the arthritis got too bad. And I can’t throw it away, what with the exorbitant web prices — at 1/20/21 there were two at ~$3K; looked like one of them’d been bid up!

... Sadly, I don’t even particularly like piano sounds, electronic or acoustic. ... Glenn Gould has started to annoy me, on my endless renaissance-baroque-theater-organ muzak, because I don’t think Bach clavier music really plays that well on the piano — the harpsichord renditions usually sound better to me. And I am totally scornful of the wildly proliferant magic ears snoots who claim all kinds of super audio privilege for various arcane bits o’ junk, astonishingly always correlating with high price$ — it’s amazing how authenticity drives up the fare!

But I am fond of schmalz, with the beautiful organs, and in lounge piano music, which I will occasionally attempt on the aforementioned DGX500, to great personal satisfaction, playing bits of antique sheet music or the marvelously EZ-play Reader’s Digest Parade of Popular Hits. ... My devotion to which has obviously fallen-off, since I couldn’t find it right away just now. ... But nevertheless I must repair my Wurly — “to destruction” if that be its fate. ... It’s been too long in the music room, sullen & silent.

The trouble is, it’s complicated! ... I actually bought a $10 video from the admirable www.vintagevibe.com, a center for all things wurlistic, but theirs is a sophisticated much-more modular 200A, with handy detachable plugs. Mine’s got wires stuck all over the place which I have to do something about, before I can lift up the central metal platform to get at at least one broken key — which, mysteriously, isn’t my fault (sadly untrue). The video was useful, in that it told me I would have to get that metal thing up, of which I might not’ve been certain otherwise — which was easily worth the $10.

But even after I fix the key, if ever, I have to replace the output transistors, or at least so I guesstimate, since I seemed to break the thing by plugging in an 8-ohm speaker, after which it will only make sad barking noises with traces of harmonic tonality. Perhaps if I ever get so far, I’ll tack in a 100Ω resistor or something, to save it from future idiots.... (These conjectures were totally wrong.)

Why not get it repaired? At one of the music stores that infest the internet? Which will never screw-up, and always charge vast $ums? Where shipping will cost more than my DGX? ... Because I don’t feel like it; I’m a pitiful DIYer, and I will fail in my own good time, which is quite leisurely, and perhaps even know the reason why. ... And really, so far I’ve enjoyed the ride — kind-of. ... I’ve bought clouds of insulated connectors, crimping tools, and cable labels for a few bucks, so I will cut cables with wild impunity. The labels were useful, but the connectors turned-out to be totally unnecessary when I finally figured-out what to unscrew, including a ridiculous volume potentiometer stuck on the totally-inaccessible bottom of the thing. ... I mean, inaccessible during performance, which is what I assume the stupid thing was supposed to do in that annoying position. I imagine the piano player crawling under with a screwdriver, the strobe lights a-flashin’. ... But I do still fear the output transistors: with the unlikeness of my 200A to the video’s, I can’t help but wonder if I’ve got the wrong output transistors (from vintagevibe).

And now that I got the metal thing out, I can fear the broken key first, which still seems utterly inaccessible. And see that spring, on the right of the detailed diagram over there ? Not only doesn’t it exist on my wurly, it doesn’t even exist in the beautiful vintagevibe video! And apparently, to repair my single key, I’ll have to take the entire piano apart. ... My chord organ is a lot easier — I guess by that still-ancient day, Hammond had figured-out what a whole bunch of grief is induced by unrepairable design. ... The wurly is just repulsive; they didn’t want you to repair it, they wanted you to buy another. And it came after the chord organ!

The Fault in Our Stars

So I got the tines assemblies off and still couldn’t take the key out, but I did at last get to see the fault — which of course was entirely mine — I used a too-long screw to put one of the wurly legs back-on in the dénouement of the Great Move, and it obstructed the key. I am totally guilty. ... And I should’ve figured-out how to see it earlier, with some kind of mirror or gadget.

... And I am doomed to put it back together and verify it still barks, just in case I’ve managed to wreck other innocent victims along the way. And then confront the wily transistor. At least I know how to get the stupid metal thing out. ... So I will continue to joyfully curse the darkness and puzzle over cryptic diagrams. ... Speaking of which, when I peeked at a schematic I discovered there’s 150 volts in there, looks like fed to the pickup at a very low current — oh my gosh, these people (search for “struck reeds”) explain it’s a capacitive pickup, of course! Like a condenser microphone; the tines are all one plate, and some kind of intricate metal structure around them is the other....

It Barks!

So after 17 months of pointless labor (subjective time), I plugged it in to let the smoke out, but instead — it barked! As of yore! Now I will try and replace those wily transistors, maybe....

Nevermore?

But then it turned-out those peculiar components I’d been studiously ignoring weren’t power supply coils as I’d ignorantly imagined — they’re fuses! And the left one is open! ... Googling “wurlitzer 200a fuse” not only found a place to buy a self-resetting replacement — which I will solder with consummate skill right over the existing blown fuse — but various webby murmurings of the distortive effect such an open causes. So my pitiful wurly was defending itself, against me! ... And once again I have gloriously wallowed in ignorance. ... However, I have had wonderful adventures, plugging in my real engineer’s oscilloscope and running an ipad through the wurly for test. And I may yet blow it to smithereens when I try out my hobbyist power-supply before/after installing the resetting fuse. ... Yup; I clipped the beautiful new fuse to the old open one — and the wurly ceased to make any noise at all! It barks no more, forever?... Arguably, an improvement, but it’s not any fun anymore. (I was stupid.)

Scopes in the Wind

I could tell which way the wind was blowing when my real engineer oscilloscope — not the Hitachi in the picture above, but my second real engineer’s beautiful cheapo Owon PDS 6062T ’scope with battery power — well, the battery didn’t work! It’d charge great, and if I unplugged the scope when it was on, it’d stay on with the battery — but it wouldn’t turn-on. Pressing button, nothing. ... This was my second scope battery, after the first one got tired, and I bought it from amazon @ 5/23/16, but apparently didn’t get around to noticing until my triumphant wurly dotage. The old battery of course still works, poorly, including as it undoubtedly does whatever jiggery Owon copy-protected it with — well, actually, it appears I never understood how to charge it — supposed to be with the stupid scope lit-up, apparently. This is totally alien to your average cognitive-impaired old techy, ’cause it was important not to leave CRT scopes on, because the tube’d wear out! But the LCD scope screen is immortal and’ll never wear out; and of course it’s wonderfully decorative even for the staggeringly out-of-date pitifully confused techy. ... And maybe the battery’ll charge better. ... And so it did!

... In dismal conclusion, at least, everything I know is wrong, which is comforting. ... And all in all, I think it’s time to button-up the wurly and let it lie fallow for a few weeks, or golden years. ... At least the high voltage’s still there....

Modularity

12/13/20. Since we’re all gonna die anyway, I figured I’d return to the struggle and try not fixing the stupid transistors, but instead substitute a tiny hobby pcboard amp, thus faking the replace-a-board modularity for which my soul thirsts. Assuming the signal is still with us. ... Which it wasn’t, when I finally bothered to check with my adorable owon scope.

Pre-Victory Reflections

... It may be hard to believe, but I was actually pretty good at repairing various Loveshaw boards back in the day, which just bears out the analog engineer’s historic whine, “anybody can do digital”, and I could. ... But these nasty little transistors just spit at me ... and I, at them....

The Pitiful Towering Victory!

Wed 1/6/21 10:23 am. I have verified an utterly complete repair! The machine bows supinely before me, begging my tyrannical mastership....

• Somewhere in the mists of time: might’ve been back in glorious Long Island. Certainly, it’s been gershtunk through most of the Trump administration. But somewhere, I foolishly tried to make the thing louder by plugging in an external speaker, and it immediately made broken push-no-pull klonking noises. I assumed in pitiful weeping guilt I had blown one of the output transistors. (I hadn’t.)

• At 5/02/2018 I was making serious efforts at buying replacement output transistors.

• At 3/03/2019 I took the thing apart, and examined fuse F-2, which was “CLEARLY OPEN” it says in my meticulous chaotic log, so I ordered “resetting fuses” — i.e., to bridge the blown fuse. The fact that such a component was available indicates, at least to my newly more cynical perceptions, that the stupid fuses blow frequently. ... This section of my log is labeled “THE GREAT FAILURE” because ...

• @ 3/22/2019, “I didn’t try turning it on WITHOUT the fuse first. Because with, and then without, it is totally without sound.”

• I didn’t at this stage bother checking the 15 volt supply, which is what powers the transistors which preamplify the stupid sounds, because I’m an idiot. ... Instead I kept taking it further and further apart.

• @ ~12/23/20 in a new-look revisit, I finally noticed the missing 15 volts — and the wire supposedly connecting it to the preamp board. ... Charmingly, the preamp wire was dangling in space all these years, having fallen off its super-reliable always-works &*)&()& genuine murican crimp connector, still stuffed onto a pin on the board. ... So the &*()&)*& crimp connector was on the pin OK, so super reliable, and the wire wasn’t. ... Eventually I used a different crimp connection — which, faithlessly, I soldered the wire to — which I’m sure will last through the Biden administration, and beyond....

• Then the rest was EZ-peasey, as the pitiful skilled technician (me) very slowly went thru testing the thing again, with/without new fuse. And of course everything works perfectly now!

• But I can still manage to screw it up easy in the reassembly!

• But I haven’t ... yet....

Moral of the Story Wed 1/6/21

Always assume the machine is evil. Should be Owen’s Fourth Law. ... It’s been my prime directive throughout my storied career, to always blame the problem. ... I mean, why not? So much in my technical life has indeed arrived broken/stupid, built in the quality murican — and now, worldwide — way. But in this sad wurly narrative, I assumed I was at fault! — How foolish of me! How jejeune! How innocent, helpless, silly.

... I would hasten to add that my beloved wurly still could use mechanical regulation: it rattles at any volume, + at least the high C sounds a little sour ... all of these symptoms are as of yore, and I have no intention of delving into them; I suspect the average wurly has been wandering just as fecklessly thru the golden years in equivalent or worse shape....

Guitar Wireless versus Wifi

But behold the machine’s revenge: I thought I had achieved total wurly domination but then the wifi went kablooie! ... Tragically, Amazon’d take two minutes to come up! ... For a few days — maybe a week! ... I had no idea it had anything to do with my resurrected wurly!

... And perhaps it didn’t, but in the exciting victory-over-wurly celebrations I tidied-up the appalling mess crudding-up the area for years. ... Away went the knots of extension cords and audio cables. No more the random gadgets turned-on/off according to the whims of fate & forgotten history. ... I’d been a pitiful elderly recluse with a bias towards turning-off my electrical junk, which practice over the tottering years had been implemented more-or-less randomly in the wurly sea of chaos. But no más — in the brave new covid era of glorious politically-sophisticated plague, I turned everything on. ... Well actually I confined the power-strip on/off control to a subset of the menacing mob of gadgets, controlling the rest via their individual on/off switches....

And after this wild reorganization, my two guitar wireless transmitters were powered up, and the receivers’ beautiful LEDs glowed green, which is odd since they should’ve jammed each other, just as they exuberantly jammed the wifi. ... So I turned them off, tedious spoil-sport that I am, and the wifi is spiffy again, actually improved a little by the wifi antenna gadget I bought in hysterical panic mode.

... But the machines got their revenge, and I doubt they’re finished....

Simple Guitar Wireless Fix: $$

But in the grand rotating world of pain & mystery, I utterly fixed even this annoying failure....

The Grand Axxe & Radio Shack Moog Restoration

In commemoration of the Wurly Triumph, I got my pitiful Axxe synth plugged-in to my ridiculous mixer setup, and cranky out-of-tune but still recognizably monophonic sound is emitted, and I believe that last time I took it apart, probably on Long Island, I hadn’t even heard of deoxit, so there is much merriment in store in the golden days ahead. ... My precious Radio Shack Moog synthesizer, on the other hand, wasn’t even on the wounded list, but it’s gone into the mix and now, along with my ridiculous Gem combo organ + my beloved cz101, I can rock away in the southeast corner of the music room and amaze passing afrits or perhaps the woodpecker I met on a tree outside the window one beautiful morning....

— the foolhardy programmer in the time of the red plague

1. I suppose I should confess that I probably knocked the stupid wire out of its iron-clad super-strong crimp while pitifully trying to maneuver a test clip around to the back of the open fuse. ... But that just emphasizes the moral of the story: the stupid machine tricked me!

2. I remembered later that I had been inspired in this lights-off practice by an article in a magazine long gone — which magazine never even disappeared into the internet since there wasn’t any — but the article was about some guy’s garage/lab burning to a crisp because of a CRT terminal igniting itself in the night. There are no CRT terminals anymore, but there are still bogus/true? stories about anything that recharges setting stuff on fire, which I fearfully ignore — ’cause I can’t use the rechargeable thing if it doesn’t get charged, and/or gets left off so it’ll be self-discharged by the time I need it. I assume that only some products do these things, but the internet rule of omerta forbids any diss of the sponsor, so it has to be pretended to be a universal menace. The manufacturers won’t even deny it, because that’d be certain suit-bait....

3. The beloved Radio Shack Moog was purchased after I fiddled with the thing in a Radio Shack somewhere on Long Island, and admired its imitation of a tuba! It was very fine. ... At least that’s how I remember it, although I must get out the instruction booklet from somewhere and set-up the tuba thing again & see. ... Well I couldn’t find the book, although it’s probably still around somewhere, but I learned it’s actually called the Concertmate MG-1 and I got a much more useful PDF copy from this fellow, who was referred by the wikipedia page. But sadly the poor little synth goes on the wounded list, making too-noisy thumps at the beginning of notes ... arousing cloudy memories of VCA DC balance problems & some little pot adjustment. ... So I whacked his scanned manual material with a pitifully-annoying windows 10 feature that’d print JPGs to PDF, but only stupidly, unless I did it 37 times ... because it’s Usux™ ... and here is 8MB of the MG1 manual + service manual in a zip.

OwenShow: The Release!

Yup, you too can enjoy my beloved idiosyncratic directory/file browser, no matter how ill-advised. ... Delphi — and Windows for that matter — may all be obsolete, but here is a link anyway (3 megabytes?). ... Complete obsolete Delphi 7 source + HTML help via the astonishing OwenHelp tools. ... And be sure to check-out JX the OwenShow (Windows) execution-history companion, q.v.!

... The Windows OwenShow link above comes with its own nifty totally-superfluous genuine Windows installation program with beautiful graphics! If that’s too silly, this is about 3 megabytes of oswin.exe, which’ll just explode into the thing wherever you run it on a command line, i.e. within some subdirectory like “c:\os” far from the maddening “program files” pathological sticky Usux™ ghetto. ... The official installation defaults to jgo/owenshow or something — although it, of course, is modifiable....

No Unicode!

I suppose I should warn that among many sub-optimal disappointments, I never upgraded OwenShow to unicode. Besides pathological sloth, I don’t like unicode; I don’t want file names in Chinese. So all the wacko characters are shown as black boxes or something, and it doesn’t bother me a bit. ... Obviously if I were Chinese I no doubt’d feel differently....

No Linux!

Sadly the Linux desktop never quite got going — but it wasn’t my fault! ... I released ages of these stupid things for Windows and Linux. But no más. ... Here is the last Owenshow Linux version (vh5) from 5/20/10 which, for a little while, worked as well as it ever did. ... And I used to use it every time I ventured forth in the fabled Land of Linux. ...

But those halycon days have passed, and Kylix (32-bit) programs, at least my vh5 Owenshow, will run no more forever in the modérne (64-bit?) Linices, at least mine didn’t, not in the VirtualBox Linux Mint thing I’ve got. .... That’d be the brave progressive Linuxoids keeping-up with the despicable Windows mediocrities by obsoleting the boring old software every few weeks so wittle lusers won’t hurt their wittle selves. ... Although, as with all things Linuxy, there may be some stupid setting the gurus know and I don’t; but so be it. And we can all use instead Midnight Commander....

All Things Decay (8/15/13)

There’s a quote I must find again in Brooks’ Mythical Man Month with this autumnal sentiment, which sadly my beloved OwenShow cannot escape, and which I must admit after years of denial: OwenShow struggles with the latest Windows systems. Because of the ridiculous numbers of directories, which resource is of course multiplied by the ingenious Microsoft scriveners without restraint — because it’s free! ... I don’t know that Brooks saw that threat, all dewy-eyed in the dawn of creation ’n’ all. ... Directory structures are free because nobody needs to see them all; except me ’n’ OwenShow, the valiant and weak ’n’ weary....

On my average Windows 7 system, OwenShow takes several minutes simply to count just the c:\Windows\ directories — I’m tapping my foot as I type — and tell me there’re 22,914 of ’em, with 115,406 files! We all have a vague idea how many bytes it takes — about 25 gigs that week — but the sheer number of directories makes the system essentially unknowable by any but machines, and even they grow weak and gasp. ... I long ago took defensive measures, instructing OwenShow to only scan the first level Windows directories, but the rot has spread to the whole system and everywhere I wander in my once-beautiful directory structures, there’re shoals and hidden corners of vast endless directories....

But then again ...

So the blinding insights offered by OwenShow have been boiled-down, by the march of time, into this simple factoid: too many directories still sux. ... Of course there are a few minor code flaws in OwenShow that, with immense effort, I could fix so it wouldn’t be so annoying — most significantly, it searches everything for various purposes, which used to be hardly noticeable but now would be greatly ameliorated by searching a restricted range — but in the event I just make do by using ever-faster PCs. ... But then again (5/18), the computers get faster, and I just don’t try to scan all the Windows directories; it’s a stupid idea anyway. So my directories, which lurk in a small integer number of root directories, work fine and OwenShow cruises into the future, stumbling and gasping....

Too Big Files

I can vaguely remember persuading OwenShow and its little friends to count above 4Gb for directory totals, and have even vaguer memories of feeling that if the files were bigger than that, to heck with them. ... Of course the marching winding years have decided that an ISO file I was trying to copy was bigger than that, and now all is lost. I will go in and try to fix the thing, converting my jejeune Delphi Cardinals to int64s, or I don’t know what, but what about the next onslaught? How can I stand against it? ... Oh, the brand new owenshow release has conquered 5 gigabyte files. These int64s are supposed to be good up to around a ~billion gigabytes, so we’ll be safe as houses....

And Still ...

So I still prefer the arthritic OwenShow to the lovely and gracious Windows File Explorer or whatever it’s called this week. ... And the ever-elaborating owenshow-crippling OS juggernaut is inevitably impeded by the sad & in-denial decrepitude of Moore’s Law....

— the autumnal programmer
5/18

Our Directories, Our Selves

Blinding Insight time: OwenShow isn’t just a cranky geekhead annoyance! ... No, no, it’s so much more! It has the potential to illuminate the only organizing principle that modern computers share: the directory tree structure, the alpha and omega of modern computerized data.

The *nix masters know, but do not speak. The pitiful Macintosh elite mutilate their directories unsought & unknowing, with the flick of a mouse — I got a mini, and did that within a day of first power-on. This dangerous stupid power was bequeathed to the Windows hordes and its File Explorer — but OwenShow doesn’t do that. ... But I actually did that in a Windows CDR-burning program! ... Clicking endlessly through the tree, I came at last upon the directory I wanted to burn from — the program, like many, was far too stupid to paste-in a path from the ever-helpful OwenShow — and, overcome by excitement I guess, I accidentally moved a subdirectory to another subdirectory with the flick of a mouse! So handy. ... If you haven’t done this yet, you don’t use Windows or the Macintosh — or you’ve secretly been using an Owenshow-like file manager — or, more likely, you just haven’t noticed; I mean, everybody who uses these machines is constantly complaining about how they can’t find anything, hence the foofaraw over desktop search gadgets which don’t work either....

And so you and practically everyone have no idea — where is the data?! ... You know it’s in the computer somewhere — probably — but the one simple actual-working real system that could help you is universally regarded as a menace to normal stupid beings, & impossible to master. ... And it’s all true; the only reason I can use it is I’m so smart. With my superior moral character and towering intellect, I understand directory structures, but unlike the guru masters, I speak — well at least I write and write and write. ... And I wrote OwenShow, so you can find your directories. ... No one can find your directories for you; you must go alone into this vast intricate maze — but at least with OwenShow you have a tool, a geeky friend, on the twisted path. ... And the reward is great: mastery, power, knowledge. ... So go forth; Know Thy Directories!

Comprehensive Discreditation

And then an inmate of a British magazine explained in his Snooty Advice column that everyone knows nested directory structures are the worst possible user interface known to mankind and distant star systems:

“The tree outline view has been comprehensively discredited as an appropriate user interface control. Alan Cooper, the father of Visual Basic and the author of the seminal book, About Face — The Essentials of User Interface Design [blathers] nested hierarchies exist for the convenience of the programmer, not the user.”

— “Tree hugger” Ask Luis page 143 PCFormat 4/05

So there you have it; Use OwenShow — Be Discredited! ...

— Thu 5/3/18 3:12 pm