My ol’ mate is terribly distorted and a shadow of its former self, and i’d love to get it back up on its feet. The patches are mostly distorted and some patches just distort on the third note, so i’m thinking its the Sid chip, not that i’m a real tech. I know how to safely replace a socketed chip though.
But can it work with any SID chip or does it need to be the 6581 r4ar in particular? Could it work with the current remakes? Anyone?
Yes this does sound like a classic flaky SID. So forgive me but my SID days were quite a while ago. As I recall most (all?) of the classic SID revisions are pin compatible but the one Elektron chose is a favorite (can’t recall all the details TBH). Finding a working classic SID is going to be the tricky part. I would write to Elektron support for sure. I imagine any tech could do the swap but Elektron would be good for some info. Don’t know anything about the remakes sorry. Good luck!
Thanks for the reply. I’ve submitted a support ticket yesterday and just doing some research on my own. I’ve got 2 Commodore 64s, one of which has never been taken out of the box! The other is my childhood machine which still worked last I checked so I could pull the SID out of that no worries, but just want to make sure it’s not going to fry that chip, then I can test it to see if that’s the culprit. Then i’d happily spend the money on buying a replacement chip.
As long as it is 6581 it will work, when I had my Sidstation I tried a few different versions and didn’t notice much difference.
Do not try a 8580 though as they are only 5̶v̶ 9v and you will blow it and possibly damage the Sidstation too.
Ok that’s great, thanks. I’ll see what’s in my C64
Thanks @darenager for that key piece of info - I had forgotten about the 8580 and we certainly don’t want any cooked chips/gear 
FYI, there are pin-compatible FPGA replicas of the SID out there.
8580 is 9v
6581 is 12v
Yeah you are right they both use 5v but the 6581 is 12v and the 8580 is 9v, for some reason I thought the 8580 was only 5v.
https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/SwinSID
also the swin sid, with the nanoswin being the same size as a regular sid chip. same pin out plug n play style.
I bought some ARMsid chips from retrocomp and I like the resulting sound better than the swinsid nano but there is a slight price difference. You can hear the 2 compared on youtube (Adrian’s dungeon maybe?). Armsid is a more (not completely, but more) accurate sounding replacement. It’s also a smart chip which auto-detects the voltage at SID pin 28 (the pin which is normally at 9v or 12v on a commodore) which tells ARMsid whether it’s supposed to emulate an 8580 or a 6581, so anything 0-10v will model an 8580 and over 10v source to pin 28 it will model 6581.
In acknowledgement of the fact this thread is almost as old as the technology in question, this is only to contribute to future searches, I’m sure the original poster has already moved on but if not, retrocomp.cz has these in stock or aliexpress has been trying to sell me “genuine” sid chips for $30 lately but I just can’t seem to trust anyone selling me unobtanium for the price of a family sized pizza.