I'm guessing the £345 price is after the bankruptcy? I read somewhere the
british distributor (could that have been Chromatix?) bought up the company
assets, put together the last batch of synthesizers and sold them.
If so, I'm guessing the firmware copyright went with them, and they seem to
have disappeared from the face of the earth as well. :-)
On Tue, Feb 9, 2021 at 4:30 AM codemechanic <codemechanic@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Then there's this ad from the April and May 1987 issues of Music
Technology with the retail price of £345:
http://www.muzines.co.uk/ad/351
-Ben
On Mon, Feb 8, 2021 at 7:23 PM codemechanic <codemechanic@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
https://www.gforcesoftware.com/blog/chris-huggett-1949-2020/).
Not sure how relevant this might be, but Jon Hodgson mentions an
"analogue frequency multiplier" in the tribute to Chris Hugget found
on the Novation website
(https://novationmusic.com/en/news/chris-huggett-tributes) and on the
GForce website (
https://www.gearslutz.com/board/electronic-music-instruments-and-electronic-music-production/1005917-4-analog-waveforms-just-4-damn-waveforms-3.html
"Throw in a Z80 CTC (Counter Timer Chip) which was also used
unconventionally (the data lines were connected to the address bus,
not the data bus, so that it would step through the waveform) and the
pitch circuitry involving an Intel CTC and an analogue frequency
multiplier and the end result is a showcase of quirky brilliance that
had me scratching my head for a while until I worked it out."
He goes into more detail in this Gearslutz thread:
wrote:
"When it comes time to read an oscillator (still part of the time
division multiplexing as you rightly surmised) that oscillator volume
voltage is used to set the reference voltage of the DAC (so it acts as
a multiplier of the oscillator volume and the waveform) and gets
clocked into the sample and hold on the output of IC26.
So, at this point the voltage changes at the nearest point after the
CTC has updated that the TDM circuitry allows... but notice that this
isn't the output. There is one more sample and hold stage, clocked
directly from the circuitry that forms the phase locked loop clocking
the CTC. It is independent of the TDM logic, so the final output will
actually change at precisely the point that the sample update clock
ticks. So, the oscillator is actually variable sample rate, even
though TDM was used to get the voltage there ready to be output."
Unrelated and more general in nature, I also came across this article
on the OSCar in the "Music U.K." magazine from May 1983:
http://www.muzines.co.uk/articles/the-oscar/7117
Viewing the original scans of the Music U.K. article helps make it
sink in how truly ahead of its time the OSCar was. That and the listed
retail price of £499! You can see the original scans by clicking "Show
Page Scans 4" at the top right of that article.
-Ben
On Mon, Feb 8, 2021 at 5:29 PM Bob Grieb <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
enough
Hello,
After looking at the photo some more, I have changed my mind.
The larger board seems to have three more or less identical copies
of the same circuit. So I don't think it's a ring modulator. Not
either.caps to be a phase shifter. Doesn't look like a filter circuit
So I have no idea what it is. Analog, for sure.
Bob
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