Mine did that when the patch-battery died. It's a common battery. It was spot-welded to the holder, and I mangled it. But Radio-snack had both the battery and holder, so I put them in.

The gibberish-screen would go away if I'd load a patch bank thru midi, but would return after powering off.

--- In oberheim@yahoogroups.com , "sloppyofficial" <sloppy.hq@...> wrote:
>
> HELP!! im having problems with my oberheim matrix 6.
>
> when it came to me less than half of the presets worked, the rest were just noise. so i reloaded the sounds from the original audio tape and to my absolute joy/astonishment it fixed it 100%.
> but now about 2 months later, I tried turning it on after not using it for about a week, and it wont even light up(at first). so i tried turning it off and on quickly. when i do that the display lights up and reads either "HHHHHHHHH","PWPPPPPPP","@@@@@@@@@" weird letter combinations like that(3 different combos consistently)i cant find if those are some kind of error code or not anywhere on the web.
> Its been plugged into a very good power conditioner since i've had it, so im not betting on a power surge as the culprit. i know a little bit about circuits and electronics, nothing looks burnt out on the board, nothing smells burnt. i removed every IC i could, cleaned and reseated it, but still same thing as before(on/off slowly = nothing, on/off quickly = letter combos)
> any way im just curious if any one has ever seen or heard of this before, and what it might possibly be, i couldn't find a single thing about it online!
> i love this synth, it have become my favorite one in the past couple of months, i would hate to see it die.
>