Expanded piano sounds distorted

lookoutt · Post by **lookoutt** » Tue Jan 19, 2016 5:28 am

I just recently got a hold of a used M3. Overall it sounds pretty good. I'm noticing that the expanded versions of the piano sounds seem to introduce distortion. I haven't had a lot of time to play with all the various settings. I did notice that if I turned down Oscillator 1 that it seemed to help some. My biggest concern is trying to determine if it's just a matter of tweaking settings or if it could be a sign of a hardware issue. Has anyone else had a similar issue? I'm going to try to find a day where I can spend checking out more of the sounds thoroughly to see if it's affecting many sounds or just the pianos. I appreciate any insight that you guys have. Thanks!

musiccankill · Post by **musiccankill** » Tue Jan 19, 2016 9:55 am

Hello!
Your m3 probably has the exb-256m memory expansion.
If you have distorted output only on the expansion sounds this must be the problem.
Before buying a new one, try remove and seat it again in place.
If this doesn't work , remove it and clean the golden pads with clean alcohol and some cotton and be careful not to leave any cotton on it.After it dries out put it in the synth and try again.
There is a service menu to make the tests but i don't know if it is allowed to be posted here..

lookoutt · Post by **lookoutt** » Tue Jan 19, 2016 2:11 pm

Thanks for the reply musiccankill. I don't have the EXB-256M yet but I have ordered it. I still have to load the sounds in when I power the M3 up. I'm going to do a more thorough test later this week to try and determine if it's just with the expanded sounds or not. Could there be other internal contacts that need cleaning? I know my older Korg Trinity had issues with a bad solder connection on an audio output in the past. But that manifested in the signal intermittently cutting out versus distorting. A simple re-soldering of the connection and it worked like a champ again. With this one I don't seem to notice it in headphones much but I start to notice it in a personal amp and on our full sound system at church it becomes quite noticeable.

Anyway, thanks for the input. I will post again once I have a chance to test it more thoroughly. I'm going to test it across a few sound systems and pick out a dozen or more sounds so that I can try to pinpoint the problem better. If anyone thinks of anything else that they've run into I'd appreciate the insight.

mikelees · Post by **mikelees** » Wed Jan 20, 2016 7:26 am

The first thing I would try would be to restore the factory sounds, so see if the distortion is due to something having been tweaked in the past, especially if the m3 is second hand.

I've noticed that the m3 doesn't seem to have much internal signal headroom, so it is quite easy to push sounds into clipping and distortion. I notice this especially with combis that use a piano and pad or strings.
A few things that help are:
- Pulling down internal volumes of oscillators, parts in a combi or overall combi volume in the tfx section. You may need to pull down overall combi volume of other combis you use to match.
- Reducing the trim setting in the combi eq tab, especially if you use the full range if the sliders to control part volume in a combi.
- The 4-way pianos seem to rely on a mastering limiter in the tfx slot to get a reasonable volume. If the piano is too loud, this can produce a kind of peaky distortion, so pulling down Piano volume and tweaking the limiter settings can help.

Another thought is that the 4-way ex3 pianos use 4 velocity layers, the loudest of which does contain quite a lot of hammer / keyboard noise, so can sound a bit like distortion when you play hard.
Hope this helps - let us all know how you get on...