I share your pain adam42!!
Even armed with the Service Manual and a box of working spares (HD, RAM, cards) it seems difficult to definitively track down root causes of these intermittent issues (boot problems, system hanging etc). Stories abound on this (and the original) Tascam forum of owners recommending various courses of action (re-seating, replacing, re-capping etc), claiming that the problem is fixed and then, days or weeks later, saying “and then it froze again”.
I have two SX1s. Perhaps interestingly, one of them is virtually unused (no more than 100 hours runtime with only the demo audio and midi songs loaded) so I doubt faulty capacitors are the issue. Both are on v1.52. Both exhibit similar problems.
If this machine was still supported and/or had a sizeable user base I dare say we (the SX1 community) would have found some lasting solutions with proper documentation by now. The reality is that, with this seemingly steady stream of similar issues being reported, the number of owners is declining. We have no idea how many fully working SX1s are still out there or whether they are all destined to join the queue for component recycling or landfill.
Everyone I know with a recording studio thinks I am mad to spend as much time as I have “flogging a dead horse”. Truth is I bought my SX1s at a good price and at a time when my preference was for a hardware solution (albeit with a supposedly “hardened” o/s) to a PC based ITB option. Ironically I wanted reliability and a way of avoiding PC platform compatibility issues! I was also strangely attracted to the quirks of the SX1 platform and willing to work around the lack of track count and limitations in terms of editing given the degree of integration and the routing flexibility. I even planned to link two SX1s or hook up an MX2424 for added track count.
I guess I have decided to give it “one last go” with perhaps more modest aspirations. If in the next 3 months or so I can get one SX1 working reliably out of my two systems and my boxes of spare parts and interface cards then I’ll be happy for the next year or two and avoid having to finding the not inconsiderable budget for an alternative platform.
Ah well, back to the drawing board! Perhaps I should give a try to something that other forum users have suggested: get it working and just leave it plugged in and turned on!
