I have a strange relationship with my Medusa (firmware 4.01). I love so many aspects of the instrument, and spent countless sessions with it, playing and learning. It’s been serviced once by Polyend for a failing OSC2, still, it’s often a pain when the filter goes crazy (resonance has become really sensitive), the tuning instability especially in P1 and P2 modes makes it a pain to play (strangely, in monophonic mode it’s quite stable on all OSC, but calibration is rarely perfect and needs finetuning), there’s also this crackling noise that’s here too whatever OSCs are in the mix.
I still enjoy playing only with the digital oscillators when the analog ones become too unstable for the day, but well, I’d love to have a fully functional unit. It’s my first and only analog synth so I don’t know how to maintain the unit healthy (apart from the regular warm up after a long period on the shelf).
Anyone knows if there’s any way to mod it or replace some components ourselves to fix issues like that ? Or can a unit be fully revised by Polyend maybe ? Could the schematics be released one day to be able to book someone locally to fix the unit ?
I meant modded, or fully refreshed or serviced. I had a really nice session with it yesterday in drone mode, the crackling sounds are most noticeable when using sine waves, but they might be caused by something else than an OSC, I saw comments on a Facebook group saying the same thing. The P2 tuning instabilities is what bothers me the most, like playing a two-note chord repeatedly quickly drifts, randomly, then back in tune (fresh preset, no XYZ mod setup), it’s not the pads, playing from an external keyboard is the same.
I could accept it as it is and still have fun, but viewing so many videos of people playing their Medusa which seems to maintain a solid tuning and fully functioning filter, with no apparent noise, makes me question the health of my unit.
Seems your unit is broken, i have a medusa “black ltd” several years now and never had the problems you described.
For tuning instability, try to reset the unit and let it do a full recalibration (refer to the manual)
The crackling can be a faulty potentiometer, though i think they are all digital coupled except the volume/headphone i would suggest inspecting there.
Since its long EoL i suspect a full service is not doable by Polyend, given the fact that the analog synth part was done by Dreadbox.
Write a mail at support@polyend.com, they are helpful and can tell you more.
Thanks @Patrick for the info, I’ll try to get help/info from Polyend. I’ve sent them the unit when OSC3 died a couple of years ago, and their support was excellent, they also fixed my Tracker’s jog wheel more recently. Now my Medusa is clearly out of warranty, and as you mention, way past EOL, but I’ll ask anyway. I’ve tried recalibrating from the menu, tried the config reset, let the unit on for a full 24h, and even tried flashing back a 3.0 firmware, to no avail. I’ll try a full reset again. Medusa is just so cool, I can’t bring myself to letting it on the shelf or sell it.
The Resonance ? I found a sweet spot for both cutoff and resonance. The Medusa filter wants to self-nasty resonate in higher register 400Hz+ so I’ve never go up with cutoff if my resonance is too high. I do however use full resonance in HPF mode where I get nice bass/drum sounds. I would suggest to get Kinotone Sparks pedal to help with some compression/controlled-distortion of the nasty resonance while getting stereo from Sparks’ filters. That pedal is like having another semi modular synth.
If you need a reverb I also recommend the Ribbons pedal (the same company hope they will make some this year) that gives you nice tape distortion or compression with beautiful reverb and 4 tracks of looper. Yes you can get cracklin and tape effects but that goes with Medusa! As far as “mating with medusa” I also used Hologram pedals Microcosm/Chroma to get some fuller sounds (stereo too) with very good results.
The tuning is pain-of-ass , I usually turn medusa on 20 minutes before I play it (like an old tube equipment) and/or I switch to the lame FM oscillators mode. I had numerous email exchanged with Polyend about tuning, but I think the Polyend - Dreadbox kumbaya didn’t work that well to finally solve the OSC tuning issues.
I wish for some sort of semi closed firmware development, (eventho I wrote about keeping firmware closed in other thread :)). There must be at least 500+ of us that could benefit from some minor tweaks. With Medusa being discontinued there could be a chance to get a piece pie. I bet if the filter is analog there is a resistor and or capacitor thta can be soldered to help with the nasty resonance. To be honest I’ve never opened medusa b/c it would be too tempting with my busy schedule. I did opened other piece of gear tho.
So If the filter is analog there would be a few good signs on the PCB a ladder filter would have repeating discrete parts, some quad OPamps would indicate another kind of filter it would be easy to locate. I suppose the best/cheapest approach to get the resonance leashed is to use some combination of resistors and anti parallel diodes that would limit the harshness but would introduce distortion too. Again I’m tempted to open that bloody box while writing this. I need to stop!
