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The Inside of a Waldorf Q

(first yellow version with voice expansion)

Overview of the opened Waldorf Q

The opened Q in its full glory. As you can see its not that crowded as a big analog poly synth. Its more like the inside of the PPG wave 2.2 or 2.3 in terms of layout (but with mirrored sides)

On the bottom plate in the front are from left to right:

Mainboard with the voice expansion on top.
A flat cable is running from the LCD board to it to send the LCD and LED data and receive the user interface values.
The FATAR keyboard action (one if not the biggest company doing keyboard actions. Made in Italy)
Power supply in a plastic box. Attached to the main board with the black cable (to long, because the power supply is most likely a third part off the shelf component) to the main board. The cable is not soldered to the main board, but by means of a jack and a socket on the mainboard. This socket is a typical wall wart socket. And so it should be easy to swap the power supply (by a technician) if needed.

On the top which is laying up side down with its back to the bottom plate are (left to right):

Left hand board holding the encoders, LEDs and buttons left of the LCD section
LCD sections with a few LEDs and encoders and some buttons
Right hand board holding the encoders, LEDs and buttons right of the LCD section

Mainboard

Here you see the Mainboard with the plugged on top voice expansion from the top. You see the little power jack in the power in socket of the main board in the lower right of the picture just between the keys and the board.
The mainboard got 3 Motorola DSPs. The voice expansion got 2 of the same DSPs.
All backside sockets of the Q except the mains in and the two pedal sockets are affixed to this mainboard only. I think this was changed on later revisions. The two pedal sockets are connected to the keyboard controller board under the key-action and is not visible on these pictures.

Here is a second view of the main board. You can see how the voice expansion is affixed on top of the main board.

Panel's backside boards

This is where all the encoders, the volume knob, the buttons, the LEDs and the LCD are mounted too. The white round stickers appear to be the "Checked" tags. They are all dated 28th of September 1999. The two letters below the date are "FG". I bet this is revering to Florian Gypser of the ex Waldorf team. And I bought this Q (without the voice expansion then) in October 1999.

Power supply

This is the build-in power supply which does look like a spare part power supply for a desktop printer. Its fixed to the Q by this metal job with a single screw to the Q's back panel and two "fingers" going into holes of the bottom plate.