Adam Bourque
Senior Member
My XP80 Yamaha Snare is starting not to register all my stick hits. I have to turn the cable to a certain degree for it to work better.
What should I do?
What should I do?
My XP80 Yamaha Snare breaking
- Thread starter Adam Bourque
- Start date
Adam Bourque
Senior Member
I tried another cable and did not work! It is also not the module, it's the actually drum. And Defender, that's what I'm trying, it's less than a year old I believe.
Defender
Silver Member
I bought my kit through Kraft Music, e-mailed a guy, took a pic for him to provide to the Yamaha rep and a couple hours later got a phone call from Kraft telling me Yamaha was sending out a new drum. You can't really beat that kind of customer support. But it sure is nice seeing it from companies in this day and age of the almighty dollar taking over everyone's senses.
MarcoMarks
Junior Member
Edit: I posted this thinking the snare pad I repaired was an XP80. I should have verified first. In reality it was an XP100SD. Good news is that the fix was successful and it's working perfectly with no chance of the problem ever happening again. The drummer also loves the snap when the plug goes in firmly now. I fixed the second XP100SD two nights ago the same way and it's a success as well. In both cases the OEM encased output jack had the front pin broken off with some in the circuit board and some still in the jack body and one of the back pins was broken off completely and still in the board. Identical in both pads.
Hi. I'm new here. I'm not a drummer by trade but a bass player who used to be a drummer years ago, and I'm also an electronic technician. I joined this forum so you can know about the XP80 problem this member is having and what is actually wrong. I just fixed one for the drummer in my band and will be doing a second one for him next week.
Yamaha uses a tip-ring-sleeve (TRS) quarter-inch plastic-enclosed output jack which has 3 metal pins on the bottom of it that are soldered into a small circuit board. It's the same one used in many synthesizers. I know Korg uses them so I'd feel confident that Yamaha does too. A replacement jack available online comes with a washer and nut to mount it to a chassis. But you'll notice the XP80 jack does NOT come through the pad's metal body nor attach there with a nut. It is only supported by the soldered pins on the circuit board inside. There is no physical support of the jack and it's just hanging out in the air.
I speculate that the TRS jack is not used for two conductors and ground like a TRS connection normally is, but is being used to carry 3 live signals to the module because this pad is 3-zone. If that's the case, the sleeve of the jack can't touch the pad's metal case or it would be shorted to ground.
As you insert and pull the TRS cable out on a daily basis when using your eKit for gigging, all stress of the force applied is on the 3 soldered joints and the 3 tiny pins of the jack. Even the slightest upward or downward movement as you pull the plug out and you've stressed the jack pin solder joints. This means that if your eKit is in your studio or home, the problem is far less likely to show up because you don't disassemble it and move it around several times a week. Some people also move the fully wired and mounted kit around as one big folded unit and that avoids a lot of plugging and unplugging.
The weight of the cable (if you don't use the cable clip (and who does?) above the "output" hole in the body next to the gain control is putting force on the solder joints as well. Combine this with the constant movement and vibration of the snare pad body as you hit it thousands of times and you have an almost inevitable disaster just waiting to happen.
In our case I took the XP80 apart and the solder joints had held but the little pin between the first solder spot close to the front of the quarter-inch plastic jack body cracked in half. At first it was erratic for a couple gigs and then suddenly quit all together because further plugging in and out moved the jack enough so the two halves of that broken pin no longer touched.
The drummer knew what was happening this time though and didn't blame the head unit or cable because this is the second XP80 he's had. The first one died like this at 11 months and fortunately Yamaha sent him a new one under warranty. They didn't even request the old one back. The new one just last weekend did the same thing at 3 months old and they won't warranty it because it's a replacement pad and not the original purchased one.
There is conflicting communication with two sources at Yamaha about this problem. His contact at Yamaha says they know this is a design flaw and that it will be fixed in the next generation but for now they're not doing anything to the ones they have in stock. If you have one that messes up under warranty, then they'll gladly replace it and hope the second one doesn't mess up too. But customer service says our drummer must be doing something wrong to the pad, that it's most likely his fault, and if he wants to send it in for evaluation they'll decide if they're willing to fix it for free or if he'll have to pay for it himself. His argument that this is the second one he's had that did the exactly the same thing falls on deaf ears. And it will take 6 weeks or so to evaluate and potentially fix it for him.
Being that he gigs with the eKit and doesn't really want to bring out his acoustic set for the smaller places we play, it needed to be fixed faster (3 days in fact) than 6 or more weeks, thus I went in and found the problem within 10 minutes.
I had to take a hack approach to it because I can't get the proper part in two days. I bought a nice plastic enclosed TRS jack with pins sticking out the back of it, hard wired it to the circuit board connection points, ran the little cable out of the hole you would normally stick your cable into and epoxied the new jack to the outside of the electronics cover plate that covers the circuit board. It is thus still isolated from any metal contact. A little crude, but the new jack is still in the same approximate location, is much heavier duty with a nice snap when the plug goes in it, and there is no longer weight on weak little solder joints that will eventually break down.
You can feel confident though that there's almost nothing else in the XP80 that can fail. The rest is built like a tank - overkill sturdy in fact. But this one spot is where they didn't design and build it like a tank and the weakness is the one Achille's heel of this fine pad. The jack is all plastic so I'm not sure why they can't add a little support brace for the front of the jack and put a nut onto the plastic threads to solve this.
Anyway, there it is. Those who aren't having problems yet, store this away for future reference. For those who are, here's your solution. It must be a fairly rare or undiscussed subject because this is the only forum where I found conversation about it.
Later.
Hi. I'm new here. I'm not a drummer by trade but a bass player who used to be a drummer years ago, and I'm also an electronic technician. I joined this forum so you can know about the XP80 problem this member is having and what is actually wrong. I just fixed one for the drummer in my band and will be doing a second one for him next week.
Yamaha uses a tip-ring-sleeve (TRS) quarter-inch plastic-enclosed output jack which has 3 metal pins on the bottom of it that are soldered into a small circuit board. It's the same one used in many synthesizers. I know Korg uses them so I'd feel confident that Yamaha does too. A replacement jack available online comes with a washer and nut to mount it to a chassis. But you'll notice the XP80 jack does NOT come through the pad's metal body nor attach there with a nut. It is only supported by the soldered pins on the circuit board inside. There is no physical support of the jack and it's just hanging out in the air.
I speculate that the TRS jack is not used for two conductors and ground like a TRS connection normally is, but is being used to carry 3 live signals to the module because this pad is 3-zone. If that's the case, the sleeve of the jack can't touch the pad's metal case or it would be shorted to ground.
As you insert and pull the TRS cable out on a daily basis when using your eKit for gigging, all stress of the force applied is on the 3 soldered joints and the 3 tiny pins of the jack. Even the slightest upward or downward movement as you pull the plug out and you've stressed the jack pin solder joints. This means that if your eKit is in your studio or home, the problem is far less likely to show up because you don't disassemble it and move it around several times a week. Some people also move the fully wired and mounted kit around as one big folded unit and that avoids a lot of plugging and unplugging.
The weight of the cable (if you don't use the cable clip (and who does?) above the "output" hole in the body next to the gain control is putting force on the solder joints as well. Combine this with the constant movement and vibration of the snare pad body as you hit it thousands of times and you have an almost inevitable disaster just waiting to happen.
In our case I took the XP80 apart and the solder joints had held but the little pin between the first solder spot close to the front of the quarter-inch plastic jack body cracked in half. At first it was erratic for a couple gigs and then suddenly quit all together because further plugging in and out moved the jack enough so the two halves of that broken pin no longer touched.
The drummer knew what was happening this time though and didn't blame the head unit or cable because this is the second XP80 he's had. The first one died like this at 11 months and fortunately Yamaha sent him a new one under warranty. They didn't even request the old one back. The new one just last weekend did the same thing at 3 months old and they won't warranty it because it's a replacement pad and not the original purchased one.
There is conflicting communication with two sources at Yamaha about this problem. His contact at Yamaha says they know this is a design flaw and that it will be fixed in the next generation but for now they're not doing anything to the ones they have in stock. If you have one that messes up under warranty, then they'll gladly replace it and hope the second one doesn't mess up too. But customer service says our drummer must be doing something wrong to the pad, that it's most likely his fault, and if he wants to send it in for evaluation they'll decide if they're willing to fix it for free or if he'll have to pay for it himself. His argument that this is the second one he's had that did the exactly the same thing falls on deaf ears. And it will take 6 weeks or so to evaluate and potentially fix it for him.
Being that he gigs with the eKit and doesn't really want to bring out his acoustic set for the smaller places we play, it needed to be fixed faster (3 days in fact) than 6 or more weeks, thus I went in and found the problem within 10 minutes.
I had to take a hack approach to it because I can't get the proper part in two days. I bought a nice plastic enclosed TRS jack with pins sticking out the back of it, hard wired it to the circuit board connection points, ran the little cable out of the hole you would normally stick your cable into and epoxied the new jack to the outside of the electronics cover plate that covers the circuit board. It is thus still isolated from any metal contact. A little crude, but the new jack is still in the same approximate location, is much heavier duty with a nice snap when the plug goes in it, and there is no longer weight on weak little solder joints that will eventually break down.
You can feel confident though that there's almost nothing else in the XP80 that can fail. The rest is built like a tank - overkill sturdy in fact. But this one spot is where they didn't design and build it like a tank and the weakness is the one Achille's heel of this fine pad. The jack is all plastic so I'm not sure why they can't add a little support brace for the front of the jack and put a nut onto the plastic threads to solve this.
Anyway, there it is. Those who aren't having problems yet, store this away for future reference. For those who are, here's your solution. It must be a fairly rare or undiscussed subject because this is the only forum where I found conversation about it.
Later.
Last edited:
Thank you so much! I was so worried that my XP80 would be trash because of this problem. This is the only solution I have found on the entire internet.