Boy Meets Synth

The last time I had my poor, battered CZ-5000 open, I tried to change the signal relay, a small component usually found in consumer electronics to suppress the thump sound heard at power-on. These are known to go bad in the CZ range, and can apparently cause all kinds of interference in the audio signal, from distortion and pops to volume drops and more. My machine was experiencing all these things, including an excessive amount of noise when moving the chorus slider. The signal relay drop-in replacement that I bought on eBay didn’t work so I cleaned the old as well as I could, re-installed it, and declared it fixed. Well, that didn’t last long. I fired up the CZ-5000 recently to install some patches I found online and was disappointed to discover that my “fix” was no longer working, and all the horrible noise had come back. It was time to address this issue permanently. And, while the machine was open, I figured I may as well replace the old LCD screen, which had a column of bad ...

Boroboro is a word in Japanese that means junky. When I opened up the box and first saw my CZ-5000, that’s exactly what I thought. Ugh, boroboro. The paint was worn and faded, there were scratches in the silk screen lettering, the screws were all corroded, and it had two or three large stickers plastered to the front, as well as a few other places where stickers had been improperly removed. It was also missing its volume and chorus slider caps. I paid $200 for this? Sometimes I get a little carried away bidding for things on Yahoo Auctions. “Wow, that’s a good price,” I think and then in my synthesizer fever I tend to not inspect the pictures as well as I should. I had no memory of all those stickers in the posted images but I went back and checked and they were indeed there. I could try to place the blame on the low-res pictures Yahoo Auctions uses but really this was all on me. Live and learn. I had wanted a CZ-5000 for awhile, ever since I first got a CZ-101. I love the Casio...