Notes: I have not tested this because it has the obviously burned wire
in it that needs replacement.
This is the old very, very complicated Synclavier II wiring keyboard
breakout circuit harness that has an Amphenol Centronics connector with
the wire bales and 3M dual row connectors, all of which are good with
no broken pins.
And I should note, those broken pins are nearly inevitable on the
50-pin Centronics. They break on the back and even more on the front,
no one else ever wrote INSERT CAREFULLY on a panel of connectors, but
NED did it five times on one panel because these are so vulnerable to
getting the pins stuffed because they are slightly loose and don't wrap
totally around and catch on the cable male plug being inserted. This
problem was corrected at the end of 1984 with the new systems,
switching to the plastic 3M connectors from the metal Amphenol
connectors which were, curiously, the only ones that broke.
This is the exact same wiring harness that was used on every Synclavier
II ever made 1980-1984, all of the interim systems after that
1984-1985, and on sort of used Synclavier IIs repackaged as Music
Engraving systems 1985-1989 or so, and only on one actual Synclavier, a
giant very rare one that almost surely only Synhouse has called the
PolyPro (NED had high hopes for it around 1990, then scrapped it, as
they were already laying off people in 1990, six months after ending
their peak year).
I'm very familiar with this and everything along the chain, as it's all
been put back into production by Synhouse, sometimes in improved
versions (everything this wiring harness does---and about a billion
other things---is done by the Synhouse CPUBOB hard circuit board
assembly [no more busted razor-split teeny weeny ribbon cable wires
soldered with no strain relief whatsoever] that is 2/3rds the size of a
dollar bill).
This wiring harness makes the very, very complicated connections
between four circuit boards, handling all the breakout from the 50-pin
keyboard cable (which comes from the ORK motherboard SKK [manufactured
by Synhouse since April 2014] if ORK or VK5 communications board
[manufactured by Synhouse since April 2014] if V/PK [and it must be the
SK2 type of input, which is the only type that 95% of all V/PKs have,
the other 5% have it as well, plus the newer type connection via the
VK13 dual input board, manufactured by Synhouse since November 2014])
to the overly complex array of three cards in the Control Unit that
support the keyboard interface, the D130/SK2 keyboard card
(manufactured by Synhouse since June 2013), the D160 card (put into
production by Synhouse September 2013 but only just recently delivered,
to be seen soon in some videos on the Synclav com channel), and the
D164 (put into production by Synhouse mid-2013 but 125+ other boards
had to come first [that card isn't really needed in the system unless
it's a Synclavier II with original/mono synthesizer voices, and there
was usually a decent stock of loose D164 cards here until the most
recent 5-10 years, so production has resumed and it's still not done,
not likely to show up until 2026 even if I'm lucky, roughly 100 pieces
of NED-related PCBAs are being manufactured by Synhouse per year at
this time and the D164 keeps going lower on the priority]).
You can see in the photos that this one has a burned wire, I wasn't
there when it happened, but this happens when some chimp uses a fake
cable, "Oh, it looks like SCSI, I have a SCSI cable, let's connect this
cheap plastic molded computer store SCSI cable to the keyboard
and...............do you smell something burning?".
Same story with the Fairlight CMI I/II/IIX/III DE-9 cables to the
alphanumeric and music keyboards, the computer store cables often have
various unused wires inside shorted/grounded to the metal shells (not
to mention the wrong type of latches), and this also makes a damaging
short circuit, but in this case the user usually gets off with just a
fuse blown in that array of fuses on the back.
But on the Synclavier II, it either (as I have seen/examined twice
before) melts down the SKK in the ORK or the D130/SK2 in the Control
Unit, which usually but not always fry a thin copper trace on the board
before blowing any cable wires (which can handle a LOT more current),
and when I've seen it, it's been on the SKK-D130/SK2 cable, but in the
case, it's on the D160 cable which I haven't seen before, and not to
the keyboard at all, but to the split wires going off to the three 1/4"
click/clock jacks there on the panel.
You can fix this on your own time by replacing that length of ribbon
cable, either prying open and reusing the 3M dual row connector and
crimping the new cable in there, or just using a new connector in that
position. Then after that DON'T CONNECT THE KEYBOARD WITH A CHEAP
COMPUTER STORE MOLDED SCSI CABLE.
I left one of the Switchcraft 1/4" jacks on there.
If you have a Synclavier II where one or more of the gold pins on the
front of the metal Centronics 50-pin connector has been sheared off,
you are screwed, you can't fix it, and even if you could butt it in
with solder tacked with some glue, it will be even weaker than it was
to start, which was WEAK, and if it breaks or bends over and shorts, it
could blow out $250-$500 worth of cards that ONLY Synhouse has. You can
use this one to replace it, and fixing out the burned wire will be a
LOT easier than desoldering, re-prepping, and resoldering and re-heat
shrinking 50 wires on the back of that metal Centronics 50-pin
connector (which, in most cases you're going to find, doesn't fit the
panel).
If you have a Synclavier 3200 that doesn't have a keyboard (standard
setup, but half of them out there have been badly modified by now),
this is what is needed to add an SK2 type of V/PK keyboard to it. Most
people trying to make these themselves do it even worse than NED did,
far worse, not supporting all that stuff on the back of the keyboard
because it's mostly just an SK2---V/PK cable. The burned wire needs to
be fixed first, of course.
Or for various custom projects of your own choosing.
No support is included with this, it's just what you see in the photos,
and the bag to hold it all in there safely.
I've never EVER seen one of these for sale and 25 years ago I might
have paid $100-$200 for one, as I was stuck with a few busted
connectors on panels and hadn't yet figured out how to make these (took
a long time of trying because I'd only be satisfied when it was done
right, not the way I'd seen it on 3200s time and time again, finally
doing it maybe 20-25 times spending all day using new IDC connectors
sort of punch down block style, far superior to soldering like this
one, and if it didn't work, spending another day doing it again, and it
always worked on the second try if not the first, and in 2018 finally
spent 11 days designing it into a circuit board that does all that
function and a lot else and has added keyboards to many systems since
then, and replaced several of these harnesses that had the fatal
failure of broken front or rear pins).