Korg Forums

tracert · Joined: 03 May 2020 Posts: 4

Over the past 6 months I have bought three Electribe ESX’s and three Electribe EMX’s. I love the simplicity and immediacy and flexibility of these machines but they have all had issues with noise.

I have tried both the Smartmedia and SD models. Korg brand and third party power supplies. The stock tubes and two variants of higher quality JJ tubes.

The Smartmedia units have a constant humming noise (not a ground loop) which I have read people say is standard across all of the Smartmedia models and is a product of the way the PSU and onboard power supply works.

The SD units do not have this hum, but instead have significantly loud white noise from the outputs.

No amount of crafty gain staging has been able to eliminate these noises. Yet in some demos on youtube I can’t hear anywhere near as much noise as I’m dealing with. And some sellers on online market places say that their units have no output noise whatsoever. It’s not a cable/mixer/headphone/in-home power issue, it’s just the units themselves.

Am I insanely unlucky and have picked up several busted old units?

Do you have an ESX or EMX that doesn’t have these noise issues??

Pleeeease help me I’m actually going insane

sl23 · Full Member Joined: 28 May 2015 Posts: 233

I have 2 EMX and 1 ESX not had these issues, but have heard a lot about it. Though I do get a little white noise from the ESX, it's not bad enough to worry about.

Apparently it's just that the tubes have to warm up due to being true analogue. How true this is I don't know.

sauce · Posted: Sat Jan 30, 2021 9:11 am Post subject:

The TOOBS are garbage, and introduce noise into the circuit no matter what, even if the Tube Gain is all the way down. They are underpowered and add aliasing and noise. Google "starved plate tube design" to find out more.

The alternative is to remove the tubes and do a bypass, which is risky. I've considered building a couple of porcelain pieces to screw into the tube chassis' and adding a limiter to the circuit, with the threshold and gain knobs in the old tube window.
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maxi4290 · Joined: 30 Jan 2021 Posts: 3

Hello

A short question. There are instructions in the Korg forum on how to convert the gray Electribe to a sampler. Is there a way to do this with the blue one? I tried it according to the instructions, but I always had to boot the firmware back to the synth version. Can anybody help me with this? Or has Korg already fixed the firmware hack.

Thanks for the Help