Arturia Minibrute

 Struck again on an Internet auction site - this time an Arturia Minibrute. 

"Turns on but no sound" says the seller. Ah well, might be something silly. Worth a shot especially at a third of the average selling price for a second hand one. 

So, it needs the odd replacement knob or two, and its a bit scruffy. 

And there is a missing screw on the bottom plate. And all of the other screws are loose .. oh dearie me, someone else has been in here. At least it is as described, power light comes on, but nothing - like NOTHING comes out of the jack. 

I was trying to work out how to listen to it, put a short jack cable into the sound interface on the huge 27 inches of loveliness. Moving the boards around to put some insulating material between the digital and analogue boards, and I thought I saw something flash. Was that a burst of sound? Then I saw how badly mangled the "main connector" was on the digital board. Clearly someone has been in this beast before, decided to  try to get the connector out and has broken the retaining clips. Then they decided to stick the connector together with a hot glue gun - badly. 

So I have checked to see if the usual places sell a mating pair of 34 pin, 2mm IDC plugs and sockets. The quickest and most reliable thing to do would be to replace the IDC connector on the cable (using the tried and tested method of a vice to compress the connector and cable together) and replace the motherboard one. I am finding it difficult to locate one of the surface mount kind for the board though. 

Should I solder the 34 connections of the cable to the board ?