Are Polysix's reliable?

I've heard the oscillators can be unstable. It seems like not many are in that great of condition to begin with these days, but if one was found in good condition or restored to that level, are they reliable keyboards, or that type of analog that is better left in the studio?

They're not bad electronically speaking. The battery problem is a whole other can of worms though. I'll let you know how worth it they are when I get my noard back from Old Crow (it's been 3 months now...)

I always found it to be stable; like any analog let it warm up before playing because it will be out of tune. The only thing you might need to do is scale the oscillators, which isn't bad if you have a tuner and can folow directions (tons of resources online for tuning at the board level). Once that's done, the Polysix is a very nice sounding board.

Of the, what, three Polysixes I've owned all of their voices have been stable. Surprisingly stable considering they're SSM chip-based.

For gigging, your problem won't be the electronics (assuming it's free of the battery issue), it'll be the chip-board case. The corners are prone to being bashed in.

I gigged for 12 years with a Poly61, though, and the case never got damaged because I took care of it. Same fundamental era as the Polysix electronically - solid as a rock performance-wise.

Another thing, the Polysix can make some mean bass sounds! I always try not to overuse the effect section because it clutters the sound. Sometimes it's necessary, being that it's only one osc and strings sound a little fake on one osc with no effects. But overall for SSM it's true - very stable. Just that the damn battery problem is gonna kill you, financially and emotionally

Yeah a guy down the street had one up for auction that ended last night at $40. Guess who didn't even bid on it once?

They are generally stable and reliable, and actually very simply built for an analog synth. SSM's can go bad (very easy to resolve) and replacing the NICD battery is a must (you have to open it up to make sure it hasn't leaked before). Also some units can not be tuned, possibly due to bad opto on the voice board. I like the Tridents much better and would recommend getting one if you only need one Korg poly

Well as it turns out, about twelve years ago I worked at a music store and someone came in who had two dead Polysixes that he wanted to trade in. It wasn't the battery issue - he'd already tried replacing the batteries. The store couldn't take them on trade so I gave him $50 for both of them thinking I could make one work with parts from both. By chance another problematic Polysix was given to me so I had three faulty Polysixes at one point, all in good cosmetic shape. I never got around to scavaging them down to one solidly-working model (I even had dreams of making a custom dual keyboard PolyTwelve!) but as I was discussing them in a forum an electronics teacher wanted them for a class synth restoration project and offered me $100 for all three plus shipping. I figured it was a worthy cause and sent them to him.

My point is that Polysixes do die from a variety of causes so reliability isn't their strong point... and believe me, I was once their biggest fan. FWIW in the 80's I owned two Polysixes at two different times that worked fine.