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Comment count is 16
Nominal - 2014-07-19

Zircon, is there even room to walk around in your place between all the piles of ancient audio equipment?


Old_Zircon - 2014-07-19

I don't have nearly as much as you probably think I do.


Old_Zircon - 2014-07-19

But there's less room than I like since I moved to a smaller place last fall.


fluffy - 2014-07-19

I miss my 01/W (bought in grad school, sold when I moved to New York), but at least the Wavedrum and Kaossilator and MiniKP and nanoControl and DS/10 mean I don't have a lack of Korg in my life.

Every time I visit Albuquerque I think about going to the used instrument shop I sold my 01/W to and see if they still have it, 10+ years later. They did have it for a few years, at least (with all my custom patches intact), and a big pile of other no-longer-loved 01/Ws, which just seems sad to me, but I'm part of the problem.

What they call "WAVE sequencing" sounds a lot like proper wavetable synthesis, as opposed to what most mid-90s PC users called "wavetable synthesis" which was nothing like wavetable synthesis.

I wonder if the A/D would fit in with my SIDstation and Yamaha TX7.


Old_Zircon - 2014-07-19

I've only used an SR but from what I've learned in choosing one there are some issues to consider when you're choosing one:

A/D

Pros:
-good interface (for a 90s digital synth)
-joystick
-audio inputs! (that's the big one)
-balanced XLR outs

Cons:
-buggier than the SR
-screen tends to fade and the replacements are a hassle to install and still aren't as bright as te original
-screen backlight can sometimes cause a whine or hum in the audio out (replacing the screen fixes that)
-notoriously big and heavy for a 2u rack unit



SR

pros:
-PCB layout was changed so even though the main board is the same circuit the new layout reduces clock jitter, apparently it sounds significantly better than the earlier versions (not many people talk about this but the ones who do say that the jitter issues with the earlier versions were pretty unambiguously negative if subtle, not a "character" thing you would want to have)
-more stable OS
-lots more built in samples
-much smaller
-responds to a few more control messages that the earlier ones didn't
-about half the price of an A/D but a bit more powerful

cons:
-notoriously confusing an slow to program from the front panel
-no audio input
-all existing software editors are either buggy, a decade out of date, absurdly overpriced, or all three
-no joystick
-doesn't look as cool



For me it came down to price and size, I didn't know about the jitter and midi performance things until I'd already got one. The best option, of course, is to get one of each, program on the A/D and then load those programs into the SR.

Either way, these things really do live up t the hype of being one of the most classic machines out there for digital pads.


Old_Zircon - 2014-07-19

Wave sequencing makes a lot of sense if you've ever used an old school MOD tracker (although I only just recently got one of these and haven't gotten to really dig into it yet). If you imagine a standard ROMpler but replace the sample with one track from a MOD file, that's more or less what it is. Not exactly but pretty close.


Old_Zircon - 2014-07-19

I should also add to the list above that owning an A/D will make your e-peen bigger, owning an SR will not.


fluffy - 2014-07-19

Ah, disappointing that the SR doesn't do the input stuff. I love using my SIDstation's filtered input passthrough (which was a very well-hidden feature on the original C64 as well, and a hell of a lot of fun).

Funny, MOD files are a lot like what PC users called "wavetable synthesis" but wasn't wavetable synthesis. (But I am quite familiar with those; I used a variety of trackers as my primary music production environment for YEARS.)

I did see on eBay that a lot of people were selling A/D replacement screens which are apparently the same unit as in the 01/W, and I am very familiar with the 01/W screen-dimming problem, since one time I accidentally left my 01/W on for a week. There are relatively-simple hacks to replace the dodgy CCFLs with LEDs though. (I never did it on my 01/W because disassembling that tank-like assemblage was way more work than I ever wanted to take on, but the A/D is a much much simpler thing to take apart.)

Also I love jitter issues. Nondeterminism in audio production is something to be embraced. That's a big part of what I love about the SIDstation - it's more like a MIDI-guided bleep-bloop jamming partner than a synthesizer module.


Old_Zircon - 2014-07-20

Clock jitter really isn't very defensible to my ear, it just makes stuff sound kind of muddy and two dimensional and harder to fit into a mix. It's comparable to shielding/ground problems, mp3 compression or just never, ever cleaning the heads on a tape machine. It's not like the kind of artifacts you can get from the lower sampling rates or word lengths on older machines, which I love.


Old_Zircon - 2014-07-20

Fluffy, have you tried grounding the filter input on an original C64? I've read that if you short it to ground when you aren't using it you can get rid of a lot of the whining noise that usually bleeds in from the video board, but I haven't tried it myself.


fluffy - 2014-07-20

I hadn't tried that, no, but I never used a real C64 for music production. The SIDstation has a bunch of whining background noise too but those are an artifact of how the SID's envelope generator works; if you disable the envelope generator (which is a chip feature that the C64 didn't expose) you get an amazingly clean signal (and more weird nondeterministic behavior that I love).


boner - 2014-07-19

ski jam


fedex - 2014-07-19

yeah, I understand ...

http://tinyurl.com/lexl8es


Old_Zircon - 2014-07-19

If that's yours then wow.


fedex - 2014-07-24

Yes and that's me new, trimmed-down studio!


Jet Bin Fever - 2014-07-21

Some wicked jams in here. I have a softspot for shitty late 80s synths.


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