If your Symphony Studio power is on, but the display screen is blank, you may be instructed by Apogee support to do a firmware recovery, this is a step by step guide.
PREREQUISITES
You will need:
8Gb, or greater MicroSD card and an adapter to connect it to your computer.
Micro SD card
MicroSD to StandardSD adapter (This will work with a Mac)
If your computer doesn’t have an SD card slot, there are USB adapters for USB-C and USB-A ports.
2.54mm Jumper connector
These are tiny. You only need one. (jack is just for size reference)
All of these items can be found on Amazon or eBay, are inexpensive and good to have around.
Procedure Part 1 - creating the bootable flash drive
Download the recovery firmware file.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oRHLpZkAxtkxRovFXhVQ0DWx2HGd-FGv/view?usp=share_link
It is a Google Drive link and will look like this:
Click on Download.
It will be a .zip file that looks like this:
If you are on a Mac, double click on it and you will get this:
If you are on Windows, right click and select “Extract All” and you will get the same “.wic” file as above.
This is a Disc Image file, meaning that you can’t just copy it to the MicroSD card,
you have to use a special utility called Balena Etcher.
Balena Etcher is free and can be downloaded here:
https://etcher.balena.io/#download-etcher
Select the appropriate version:
(ARM64 means Apple Silicon)
Run the balenaEtcher-2.1.x-arm64.dmg.
It’s one of those drag it into your Applications folder installers.
Do that and then launch Balena Etcher from your Applications folder.
Next you will see this:
Click on “Flash from file”.
Finder (or Windows File Explorer) will open. Navigate to your downloads folder, select symst_recovery_sd_0.0.35.wic
and click Open.
Next you will see this:
Click on Select target.
Next you will see something like this:
(you may see other USB drives, just note the size of your MicroSD Card)
Balena Etcher pretty much figures out where flash memory devices are on your system, and in this case it has correctly identified the blank MicroSD card that is attached to this computer. In this case it identifies it as “Generic MassStorageClass Media”. The name you see may be different.
Note: you do not have to format this media beforehand, Etcher completely overwrites the whole thing.
Click the check box - both boxes will become checked.
Click on Select 1.
Next you will see this:
Click on Flash and it will start the writing process.
You will be prompted for your password.
You might see this:
Click Allow
After you enter your password it will actually start writing to the flash card.
It flashes and then verifies. The whole process takes about a minute.
When it’s finished you will see this:
Balena Etcher unmounts the drive when it’s done which sometimes causes MacOS to tell you that you’ve done something wrong. You haven’t.
Your MicroSD Card is now a “drive” that the Symphony Studio can boot from.
Procedure Part 2 - Booting and flashing your Symphony Studio
Unplug the power cord.
Remove the cover.
We’ll be focusing on the area marked in red.
Zooming in we see the header pins and the MicroSD Card Slot.
This is how they appear unpopulated.
Place the jumper on the pair of pins marked BOOT MODE 0 and put the MicroSD Card in.
A closer look at the pins (view is rotated)
Plug the power into your Symphony Studio and turn the power ON.
The firmware is now being written.
There will be NO indication that anything is happening.
The front panel display will remain blank.
This process takes about 30 seconds.
When the process is finished the Symphony Studio will power itself down.
Remove the MicroSD Card and the jumper and power the Symphony Studio back on.
The Firmware recovery is complete.