I feel I know PC-88's pretty well, but this problem has got me baffled.

I've been helping my keyboard player do setups on his PC-88 MX - because of some other gear in his setup, we have reassigned the default channels for each of the four zones as Channels 6, 7, 8, and use the fourth zone as an external only zone to drive a Korg TR-Rack (it's set to channel 12).

What we are doing is chosing 2 or 3 of the internal sounds of the PC-88 MX, and assigning them to each zone, for a fat combination sound.

Sometimes we are using the regular bank sounds, sometimes the general midi sounds, sometimes the expansion voice bank sounds, there is really no pattern to which sounds we are picking for a given setup except we are not using the 64 voice poly bank sounds (which are just duplicates of the original stock bank).

What is happening is AFTER we have programmed in the sounds to the zones, sometime later (sometimes in the same programming session, sometimes the next time we cut it on, sometimes a few weeks later), the PC-88 MX will puke out our carefully assigned programs, and substitute some other program for that zone in the setup.

Most of the time this occurs only with the first zone, and most of the time it resets itself to Program 091/General Midi - this sound is called Space Voice Pad.

You can then go into the setup, edit the zone BACK to the actual sound you want, SAVE IT AGAIN, and as soon as you load the setup again it changes back to that damn Space Voice Pad sound.

I've checked the bank/program assignments for the zone(s) and these get changed as well, AFTER I've programmed them in and SAVED the SETUP.

I've made sure the zone(s) are set to entry transmit, so they transmit the correct bank and program change when the setup is loaded.

We're going round and round with this POS, and it's really starting to piss us off.

Now the weird thing is, I have a friend that has a stock PC-88 (non MX) version. I programmed his extensively over a year and a half, doing basically the same thing (one to three internal sounds, combined with an external module on zone 4). Now it's over a year later, and his still has the sounds I programmed in, they haven't spontaneously changed.

The difference is of course, that he has only the original bank sounds, no MX sounds.

It seems to me that there's some sort of undocumented bug or something related to the addition of the MX board (this is a factory MX we're talking about here, not a field retro fit) that's causing the zones to reset to some strange default program.

If anybody could shed some light on this I would really appreciate it (I know that Kurzweil product reps sometimes troll this list so maybe they can help).

Thanks in advance.

Jay Storey