nasty chip

[J.D.McEachin]

At 04:01 AM 4/23/99 PDT, Paul Nugteren van wrote:

>Why is this patchstorage in all synths the same? 

No, the CS80 had a flip=up panel with 2 tiny duplicates of the front
panel switches & sliders.  Not very cost effective, and it's a bitch
to get them to sound exactly like the front panel patch.  The presets
are resistors & diodes.  Some people took to changing their presets
by soldering in new resistor values.

>Didn't anyone hate 
>the idea of quantisation in that time? Yeah, right I forgot 'digital' 
>was THE word at that time. 

Dealing w/ quantization was considered a small price to pay to have
patch storage.  You might take it for granted, but back then patch
storage was a BIG deal.

>But really I hope you DIYers can imagine 
>that it's totally ridiculous to have quantisation on an analogue 
>synth. I would have prefered to have it bypassed for performance 
>mode. 

I don't think it's ridiculous.  A lot of people don't even notice.
It's all a matter of implementation.  At the time ADCs and DACs and
SRAMs were expensive, especially in high resolution.  So people
tended to use 8bit ADCs and SRAMs, and 12bit DACs.  Sometimes the
ADC values were truncated, the JP6 uses 7bits and I think the original
PAIA Proteus used 6bits.  Using a higher resolution DAC allowed 
modulation sources to be added.  Really good software could interpolate
between values when twiddling knobs, but this usually wasn't the case.

With a 16 bit AD/DA path, I doubt you'd even hear the quantization. But
that wasn't economically feasible back in the 70's & 80's.

JDM