all previous claims to the unit being flawed from the factory are being redacted by myself.

Wow, you should like buy lottery tickets, what are the odds of this!?

Seriously though, damn, not very good news if that's indeed a production flaw and it does seem like it. If they all were fresh of the press straight out of the factory than that spells trouble for Roland.

You got terribly unlucky there man, hope they will look into this fast and get you one that works!

On my 555 I just hold roll, as you did, and hit a pad and it rolls.
What a headache, man, I wish you the best of luck.
Can you just get refunded and go somewhere else, maybe?

That might not help if it's a production flaw though.

wow thats bad. I guesse they gotta get it right eventually

I think Roland owes you a free 555 at this point.

damn dude dats wack. but when u get a workin unit of some kind (maybe a 404 in da works) you can at least make some hi-quality videos. whatever cam your usin is clean

word

how do you see the video?

When you click on his link it goes to a page where video starts rolling.

all previous claims to the unit being flawed from the factory are being redacted by myself. i found the cause. it bothers me that Roland never found the cause and doesnt have the cause listed in their manual (to the best of my knowledge - i am pouring through it page by page to make sure):

i have a complex setup (as you can see HERE). the problem has been traced to MIDI. if i unplug the MIDI from the unit - the button seems to work. this has led me to a hypothesis:

the pad functions as a retrigger and may use a MIDI implementation to accomplish this feat. the unit is probably looking for a clock source and since it couldnt find one - the pad didn't work. if i unplug the MIDI cables from the unit - it probably uses its own internal clock source. thats the only thing i can think of. so now i am hunting down a way to keep it plugged in and have full functionality of all buttons.

basically - this means that every unit that was sent to me probably all worked fine. unless there is an issue with the MIDI ports which i am still looking in to.

I wonder if perhaps someone else on the forums with a SP-555 could check if he or she's getting the same problem (probably with different gear attached to the MIDI ). It could be other gear interfering with the general functionality for some reason.

I take it the SP-555 is the MIDI slave then, or?

I will check that and see if thats the case. If you set the midi clock to internal it should work and you should still be able to trigger it from an external source its just not going to sync sequencer tempo with other pieces. Which isint a big deal.

It'd be nice if you could check that out indeed.

I seriously wonder why Roland didn't thought of MIDI as the culprit when it's supposed to be a common side-effect of using MIDI. Apart from not being described in the manual as Hyde said, all this leads me to believe it's not a very common side-effect and perhaps still a flaw of some sort.

I don't quite see why the roll button wouldn't function with external MIDI clocks giving time information and so on either.