Wine Country Prophet 5 Repair Costs?

[Alex E]

Not sure what forum this belongs in, but I put it in here.
I'm trying to convince a guy who used to work for sequential I know to help his P5 get working again. He hasn't used it in probably 15 years and he thinks it's still worth about $1200.

Just wondering how much a typical Wine Country restoration might cost...

OSC 2 is funky, the keybed needs work, and I think some pots aren't working.
Wine Country said any work at all starts at $239 for 2 hours of labor. And while I don't have enough information yet to give you guys, or them, a good idea of what's wrong, what's the most we could expect for a P5 restoration?

Hope it's not too vague, but I was wondering if anyone here has some experience with Wine Country and how much it cost them to fix something up...

[rokuez]

I got my prophet 5 rev2 fixed by Greg @ www.analogsynthservice.com

I would take it there instead of wine

[Alex E]

Cool, cool. How much did that ultimately cost you?

[EdGs]

FWIW, definately not WCS. I have seen several listings on Ebay where sellers had their repair invoices from WCS posted and I don't recall seeing even one that was less than $800. I realize that it does take a bit of doing to get things sorted and such, but wow!

When I first got my P5, I e-mailed WCS to see if they wanted to buy it since it had alot of issues (moisture, every pot frozen or broken, staining on the metal, rust on the keybed, etc.) I was honest about the condition, and they said it was, at best, 'a parts machine', not a good candidate for restoration, and offered me a whopping $225 + shipping IF all the IC's were present. What an insult! h**l, a guy at a local music store offered me a grand for it, sight unseen, just based on my description of it.

I asked WCS for prices on some of the chips: CEM's----$95ea. CA3280's---$25ea., etc., etc. That would make for some great profit even if only half of the chips in mine were usable. As it turned out, with some cleaning, TLC, and lots of help from users on this site and others, my 'parts machine' that was not a good candidate for restoration is now looking great, and 95% functional (I hope to get her finished, but she is packed up as we are in the process of moving).

Sorry to have rambled on a bit, but I have also heard that Greg at analosynthservice is very good, but haven't used him. Just say "No" to WCS. Good luck with the repairs.

[Alex E]

Thanks. I'm still waiting to hear back from the guy but clearly WCS isn't the way to go.

analosynthservice seems like the best route for now. I'll let him know about greg!

[plikestechno]

As far as Wine Country goes, a $30 transaction lost me as a customer forever. I wanted a sustain pedal to go along with the double pedal that came with my T8 and they sent me some rebadged Yamaha typical c**p that I could have got at a thrift store for two bucks. I even sent a picture of what I was looking for and on top of everything they took forever to ship it. But yes all I've heard about WC is that they're perfectly fine for getting parts but for restoration they'll gouge you and really, Prophet 5s are so common that I'm sure every large city has a tech that's worked on one at some point.

As far as spending a lot of money repairing vintage synths goes I think of it like home renovations.

If you're going to keep the synth forever and just want to get it in perfect working order then it might be worth $500-$1000 to get your Prophet 5 fixed once every 20 years. There's a reason they make service manuals. One can't expect electronics to last forever. I can't imagine how fixing a Prophet even at WC's exorbitant rates could be more than 1k so if it's a keeper then it is probably worth it.

But if your friend is just looking to flip it, and it's in really good physical shape, he could list it tomorrow on Ebay and get $1500 easy for it with all of its warts and issues. At a certain point, is repairing it going to help sell his synth for getting more than $1500+the cost of repair? Maybe not with a rev 3.whatever. But if it was a Rev.1 or Rev.2 a WC serviced one might fetch 4k and that would definitely be worth the price of repair.

[rokuez]

it cost me $250


Repaired the CPU board (replaced ICs 347, 355, 356, 320, 321); replaced ROMs with working ones.
Replaced bypass caps on all boards.
Front panel: cleaned pots, switches, replaced dead IC208.
MIDI board: repaired faulty connectors.

Tuned & scaled power supply, CPU board & voice board.

Reloaded factory patches.

^^ everything greg did for my p5.

greg is a great guy and extremely fair in his repairs!!

take it to greg, period. I drove my prophet 5 from LA to Northern California just to have greg service it and because I didn't want my synth going thru a shipping system (fedex ups usps) and getting destroyed in transit.

i then drove all the way back to norcal and down to la to get it back down here.

bottom line if you can drive it to greg do so because the prophet 5 could always gets destroyed in transit.

[Steve Jones]

Another vote for Greg here.

[bhrama]

Trying to email Greg @ analogsynthservice, but I keep getting an invalid email return. Anyone happen to have his phone, or a different email?

I'm using [email protected]

thanks for any help

[voicedood]

That's his correct email.

I just emailed him yesterday and got a response last night.

Greg's the best. Fast turnaround time and fair pricing.

He installed the midi kit, did the memory expansion, replaced a vco chip, replaced the power cord and glide pot and did a routine cleaning/maintenance on my P5. All for under $300.00 and in one week. He's also worked on my OB8

Wine Country was a complete joke and a rip off, IMO. i'm an hour away from them and they wouldn't allow me to drop it off, WTH?

[Googlydog]

bumping this thread because I just started a repair transaction with Wine Country and it already feels like a rip-off and a mistake.

Regretting...

[themilford]

Just want to chime in to add to the slander.

f**k these guys... find a square repair guy and support him.
.
WCS are running a racket.
I ordered a replacement slide switch from them for my P600. $9 for the switch and they charged me $10 shipping. Got the switch delivered USPS with the postage. clearly marked as $2.50 on the package. Also, it was used and had clipped pins (still worked but made soldering a little more difficult). They didn't specify that it was NOS, used or a new part... I guess that's on me.

Just for shits I'm gonna price out having this exact switch manufactured new and I will offer them for sale for a reasonable mark-up and charge ACTUAL shipping. It was a pretty standard switch at one time so it could be useful in other restorations as well. Might as well do this for the pots also.

[Steve Jones]

Send the synth to Greg.

[synthparts]

Yep, Greg's the man for P-5 repairs. Got my Rev. 1 completely working for less than $200.