From time to time we get calls from Kurzweil (and other equipment) users who report very strange, almost impossible, behavior from their machine. Normally a hard reset, soft reset, or power cycle and reboot will correct most misbehaving electronic equipment, but occasionally none of these things will work. The easy conclusion to jump to is that there has been a hardware failure. In a recent Kurzweil episode we had a customer who reported “strange tones” coming out of her machine on certain types of sounds. By having her call up and play a silent keymap we determined that the strange tones were actually happening all the time any time a key was pressed. No amount of hard or soft resets helped. We decided to have her remove the batteries from the machine and let it sit a few hours. This corrected the problem. Why would this work when a hard reset doesn’t? The only possible answer is because a hard reset doesn’t really reset everything in a Kurzweil. The fact is the Digitech effects chip that is built in to all K2000 and K2500 machines is not reset during a hard reset. Removing the batteries for a few hours accomplishes this.
We’ve also seen instances on Macintosh computers and quite a bit of other equipment where truly removing ALL power from the circuits will initialize things that are not reset during restarts or hard resets. Often you have to leave the power removed for a few hours because they may have capacitors on the board that stay charged for a while and provide power. This is the hardest of hard resets (short of removing components from the circuit boards) and can be a good last-ditch effort to try to resolve problems before sending equipment in for repair.