LED indicator noise in System 700

I’ve never been able to get the LED indicators to work well in any of the System 700 circuits I’d made. Even with no input, the green light would stay on and horrific screechy noise would get injected into the output.

Vowing to finally get it sorted out I connected up my 703E VCF clone, got the expected horrible noise and stuck my oscilloscope on the +14.4V LED power line. It showed that the power line was oscillating at about 32MHz, at an amplitude of about 200mV.

Then I tried some stuff like bunging different capacitors on the LED power line and different power supplies, but nothing did the trick.

Some of the schematics suggest that CD4001AE is the right version of the IC to use, although confusingly, not all of them. Also all the pictures of the boards I’d seen have AE or UBE versions of the 4001 in place. Found some old RCA AE variant chips on eBay and gave them a go:

CD4001AE in the 703E filter

DAMMIT IT WORKS.

I wasn’t keen on relying on 35+ year old CMOS chips, so I ordered a few 4001UBE, and they work too.

Mystery solved, put the kettle on.

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