About a month ago I purchased an early 1990s Young Chang grand piano
for general practice and enjoyment.  It is a white finish, so as you
can guess not to many people were beating down the seller's door to
purchase it and I got the piano for just under $3000.

When I arrived to inspect the piano before purchasing it I found that
besides the fact that the piano was in near perfect condition, it was
also equipped with a PianoDisc PDS-32 solenoid player system.  I was
told that the system hadn't worked in years and that it was being sold
as a regular piano because there was just no one who could fix these
older units and the owner stated he paid a PianoDisc technician to come
and look at it and was told the system was not repairable and that the
system needed to be upgraded.

Well, after paying for my new treasure and having it moved into my
house I thought I might as well try to tinker with the system to see
what was wrong and if I could get it to work.  After checking the power
supply and so forth I found that whoever had serviced the system had
actually plugged the wires from the power driver board to the MIDI
control board in a few pins to the left, thereby shorting out the
MIDI board and rendering the system inoperable.  The tech had also
installed a new diode in the wrong position, which shorted out the
power driver board.

After replacing chips and diodes and working out timing bugs and so
forth the system now works perfectly.  The only issue I have is a few
solenoids are sticking and need to be replaced and I can't seem to find
anyone who has parts for this system.  I have called many PianoDisc
techs and found most of them are either completely unwilling to help or
are ignorant of the old systems.  A call to PianoDisc tech support gets
you a quick "we do not support that system" and nothing else.

I find it odd that everyone would just walk away from that technology
which all in all is not that hard to repair.  Most of the parts are
available from electronics supply houses and even Radio Shack.  It
seems everyone at PianoDisc wants you to just pull out the old and
pitch it and buy a new IQ system and be done with it.

I agree that the PDS-32 has its crude points but all in all it is not a
bad system and plays remarkably well considering how old the technology
is and the complexity of many of the boards.  If anyone has any solenoids
for the later model system 32 please contact me.

John Johnson
cooltoledoguy@yahoo.com.geentroep [delete ".geentroep" to reply]