Rui Carmo
The Yamaha CLP-F01PE is a Clavinova digital piano with impeccable design that we have owned for over 20 years:
Maintenance
After alomost 20 years of use, ours started developing a few issues in late 2024 (intermittent garbled audio with digital distortion that became more frequent and worse with time). It had previously been serviced once to replace keyboard strips, so we reached out to Yamaha support in Portugal, which paid us a visit and said it was a motherboard issue.
There were a few awkward moments since they were not used to servicing these vintage models, but they tried to get a replacement board from Yamaha, which (when it came) was the completely wrong part. This is what ours looks like:
Fast forward a few months, and I noticed that the symptoms improved when I jiggled the main board a little. I eventually bought a copy of the schamatics from eBay, and after a few hours of poking around I realized that IC1 (which is effectively the wavetable ROM) was the most likely culprit, since it was socketed and jiggling it alone fixed the issue temporarily.
I also inspected most of the boards and saw no obvious signs of damage, corrosion or bad solder joints, so I decided to try reseating the ROM chip.
I patiently removed the chip, cleaned the pins carefully with a wire brush, applied DeoxIt to the socket, and reinserted it. It’s been a couple of months and the problems went away again–temporarily.
I am now exploring other options, which include re-cleaning and checking the few capacitors on the board (which I am hesitant to desolder since they show no real hint of problems and do not seem to be directly part of the audio circuitry).
Although it is unlikely that I will ever be able to share the schematics (I was only able to get a printed version that unfolds to around A2 size), I will be adding whatever information I can below: