To protect it's internal electronics from damage, I decided to test the power supply first without any connection to the rest of the components. The result was pretty good, all voltages are there and also in the correct range. Time to reconnect and to boot the synth completely ... ok ... no sound at all until the odd sounding hiss of the Display-foil HV-Generator. The synth booted flawlessly, the display contrast and backlight was very weak but it was possible to operate it from the panel :o)

I measured a while and detected a empty backup battery. This is in most cases the reason for missing or odd sounds. The sounds are stored internally in a static RAM memory that needs the backup battery to keep it's ingredients over time. To complete the test I decided to recover the standard sounds. I found a Factory-Cassette-Dump wave-file for the PPG Wave 2.3 at ppg.synth.net in their Download section. After searching and reading only half a hour in the manuals, I was ready to start the recover process over the tape interface. I really love this ... it is a sort of secret weapon that works well if you growing up with cassette player's and dubbing cables ;o) After a successful restore of the program-data this iconic synth take it's first breath ... since years !!!

The second thing was the keyboard. It looks so sad ... The key's lining looks like a roller coaster, some keys can't be depressed at all and the surface of the keys are really dirty and scratchy too. Beside of this there are a lot of missing and double triggers. The housing shows some scratches on the top of the case so the overall visual impression was really sad too :o(

I decided to order the necessary special parts from Virtual Music in Vienna because everything that I need for restoration is available there and all components and parts are of exceptionally high quality. The parts are :

- a new backup battery kit
- a complete keyboard rework kit,
- the newest operating system ROM's,
- a spare LED-Backlight display