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The Fader Story

Analog Wizard provides professional Services for Audio/Studio/Synth repairs and development.

For the repair of a not working Roland Jupiter 6, we received 12 pcs. of 30mm Faders directly from our
Customer (bought on eBay from a French seller) to be used as a full replacement for old and defect
original Faders on the Jupiter6 Front Panel.

After professional replacement and during the final sound tests, we realized that the new Faders did
neither provide smooth movements nor reliable sliding contact for generating the necessary DC control
voltages of 0 to 5 Vdc. 6 of a total of 11 replaced Faders where making problems. Faced that, we decided
to open a Fader and check the quality to compare against the original Roland Faders and a 30mm ALPHA
Fader that was lying around in our lab.
We finally decided to remove all of those new “cheapchi” Faders. We meanwhile found high quality
replacement Faders from ALPS for 2/3 of the cost of a crap Fader. They even include the Fader coverage
just to mention this very important detail!
Smooth Fader action, separate sliding rail, perfectly working in the repaired Jupiter 6.
The old dried out Fader Covers (another problem of old Roland gear) have been fully removed.

Right side:
Example of a new high-quality
Fader including an integrated
Fader cover (ALPS)
(This is the stuff analogwizard
recommends and this is the only
quality we will install for future
repairs)

We may open an ALPS Fader in Future

once we have a spare 😊

Right side:
Pile of unsoldered crap Faders
after they showed unacceptable
performance and contact problems
with the Jupiter 6

The new ALPS Faders (above)

worked absolutely perfect once we
soldered them onto the board.
The smooth travelling action made
it easy to adjust even the smallest
changes in sound. And you get the
fader cover for free!

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2021/03 © www.analogwizard.com repair@analogwizard.ch

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www.analogwizard.com

Below we list the clear Quality differences between the low-quality Faders (most probably cheap Chinese
ALPHA Fader copies) an old ALPHA Fader and the original Roland Faders:

Topic / Test Low Quality Fader (new) ALPHA Fader (old) ALPS / Roland Faders
Steel Housing Metal 0.4mm 0.5mm 0.5mm
thickness (stability)
Fader Wiper fixation 2 Point one sided 2 Point one Side 4 Point double sided
Slider support Non Non Additional separated
sliding rail part (black)
Resistor coating Low quality resistive High quality, no abrasion High quality, no abrasion
coating (black abrasion)

Metal slide contact Low quality, oxidated High quality metal High quality metal
metal, contact problems coating, no contact coating, no contact
Low quality PIN problems, good PIN problems after cleaning a
connections (new buy) connections (old Fader!) 40Y old Roland Fader!
High Quality solder PIN
connections (see below)

Fader Only 3 Parts Brand printing on ALPHA 4 Parts with sliding rail,
Construction no branding, thin housing Fader, stable housing Stable housing
Pictures (cleaned Fader still
making problems)

Roland
Fader
printing
Slider Construction Weak 2 Point fixation, Weak 2 Point fixation Strong 4 Point fixation
new but oxidized!

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2021/03 © www.analogwizard.com repair@analogwizard.ch

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www.analogwizard.com

Fader Repair Experience for an MPG-80 Super Jupiter control unit

One of the problems we face these days is, that for many old faders, no new 1to1 compatible
replacement parts are available.
A recent example we did was the Restoration of an MPG-80 controller for the Super Jupiter MKS-80.
Unfortunately, all faders on the MPG-80 are 25mm travel length and we could not find high-quality
replacement faders for it. We decided to unsolder all of the original faders carefully, disassemble the
faders into their single parts and cleaned them all with our special ultrasonic cleaning process. After
drying the parts and applying a specially selected silicon grease to the gliding rails and the sliding parts
(but not on the resistive part) we reassembled each fader and the result was absolutely amazing.
Every single fader was tested and was working like new! The operational feel of the gliding action was
super smooth and precise over the whole travelling length. Here at analogwizard, we have seen a lot of
new gear with faders during the past, but hardly any of those left us with the same good feeling we got
from our perfectly cleaned and restored Roland faders!

Faders before and after

the cleaning process.
Fader housings, sliding parts
and wipers where of course
treated as well and got
perfectly clean.

Once we got this perfect smooth action, we instantly looked for a replacement of the dry old fader covers
inside the Roland Unit. If you replace any faders, make sure you replace the old fader covers too, or just
remove them. They are in fact the major reason for destroying your new faders within a few up and
down moves, as the dry felt-type covers produce a lot of dust dropping directly into the fader.

Get rid of these

felt covers
even if they
look better
than this….

We did not want to install any new felt-type covers as they will have the same abrasion problem within
short time. Instead we made our own fader covers out of antistatic plastic foil normally used as packaging
material for semiconductors. That was a bit of work, but in the end, it worked as good as the new ALPS
faders you can see at the beginning of this report with no harm to the gliding action.

In future, before we mount any crapy faders from unknow sources, or trying to install a wacky PCB
adapter solution, we will first try if the original faders can be cleaned and restored to work as new.

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2021/03 © www.analogwizard.com repair@analogwizard.ch