Jitter in VCOs

[Christopher_List at Sonymusic.Com]

>  I've noticed that several synth enthusiasts believe in
> "best" technology for implementing their gear ...
> I wonder if that's not a mistake ?!
>
> As in vacuum tube circuits where 5% of 2nd harmonic
distortion/enhancement
> contributes good richness to a solo source like a harp or guitar (maybe
not full mix)
> then perhaps 5% jiiter on an oscillator (discrete Moog, EMS, ...)
> might sound more pleasing than the 0.01% jitter of an op-amp based VCO.

This is kind of like the discussion last month about bringing trim pots out
to the front panel. It was pointed out that the downside to such an
approach is that you don't have a stable reference for your instrument and
it makes it harder to get it to behave predictably. I would think that
instead of trying to build in imperfect VCO, it might be more varsatile to
build a "perfect" VCO and then do things like modulate the frequency or
trigger refernce voltage with a tiny bit of noise source or (something
similar) when you want an "imperfect but rich" VCO.

- CList