I have indeed had a few keyboards pass over my testbench where a ribbon cable failure of some kind was the culprit. Most times a cleaning of contacts or a simple blanket replacement of said cable is the cure. In the case of the mentioned Ensoniq, desoldering the cable pins and hard soldering the ribbon cable from board to board is the preferred method that lasts. In the case of this particular Ensoniq, it was stated that the ribbon cable had already been hard-soldered at a previous time. If that is still holding up, and no other ribbon cables have failed, the power supply would be the next logical area of investigation for this kind of fault. The good news is that the problem is most likely to be caused by one or the other, going by the number of them I've worked on, which isn't a statistically significant amount, really. The older keyboards are actually built like tanks in comparison to some of the newer ones in this regard, the technology of that era tends to lend itself more favorably to less expensive repairs like the ones mentioned as versus the need for proprietary parts replacement, that't the good news.


--Mac

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