A few weeks before Christmas 2020, I was contacted by someone who’s Cheetah MS6 had not just blown up but had also tripped the electricity supply in his house! The upset MS6 owner sent me his unit and to cut a long story short, I ended up building an external power supply for the MS6, prior to repairing it.
The customer was then reluctant to pay for the repair and the power supply. Being quite amicable, we agreed that I could keep the MS6 to sell. To be honest, I just wanted to get my money back on the power supply and the repair.
While the Cheetah MS6 is a lovely little (British made) synth module, the power supply is well, crap and so I thought it a good idea to document the build of my external power supply in a post of 27th January 2021. I couldn’t believe how many enquiries I received and although frightfully expensive, I've lost count of how many of these things I’ve built now.
Anyway, after five minutes on ebay, that ol’ Cheetah MS6 got snapped up and indeed someone picked up a bargain. As I recall, it ended up travelling in the Manchester direction.
Well, last July, I was contacted by this dude who, it would seem, ended up with this particular MS6… but without the power supply!
The guy who bought the MS6 off me via ebay, must have eventually sold it and sadly, it would appear that the next owner passed away. The current owner (Charlie) then bought it at a house clearance auction.
I really couldn’t believe that this was the same MS6 but Charlie sent me pictures and indeed, it was the very same unit on which I prototyped my external power supply for the Cheetah MS6.
Charlie wanted his new MS6 up ‘n’ running and so he sent me the unit last August with a view to build another power supply.
It feels quite strange, virtually doing the same work twice on exactly the same piece of gear but like the post heading reads 'occasionally weird things happen'.
The Cheetah MS6 is an enigma. Launched in the late eighties by a small British computer manufacturer, this rather unassuming, multi-timbral, six-voice (twelve-oscillator), analogue synthesiser module is loaded with CEM 3396s and sounds amazing. It's such a shame that it doesn't have a couple of frills like chorus on stereo outputs, for example. On the other hand, the range of sounds is extensive and the quality of lush analogue sound is just so beautifully vintage. 🙂
UPDATE - 1st November 2023
This morning I received the most lovely telephone call from Charlie. He'd called to confirm receipt of his Cheetah MS6 including my external power supply and just wanted to express his gratitude and amazement at the build quality of the system. 🙂