Vocoders.....Judgement Day

[WeAreAs1 at aol.com]

Dave Magnuson wrote:

<<I just remembered another vocoder that I haven't seen mentioned yet...   the
Next Vox-II.  Info is at www.nextdj.com.  >>

The Next Vox-11 is the MAM VF11 with a different name on it.   Exact same
unit!

I've played with it a bit - it sounds very good for the price.  I was the
keyboard player in the band Oingo Boingo during the mid '80's.  (European list
members all saying "Oingo who??" in unison...)  I used to use a Roland rack-
mount SVC355 vocoder for our live shows.  It was not very reliable, and it was
sometimes difficult to get the kind of clarity I desired from it, at least in
a loud concert situation (it sounded great on our studio recordings).  I used
an MKS80 Super Jupiter for the carrier signal, which worked very well for that
job.

I think the MAM/Next/F.A.T. vocoder sounds just as good as the Roland did, if
not better.  I have a Roland SE70 these days, and it sounds amazingly good for
a digital vocoder - nice other effects, too!  If I didn't have the SE70, and
was going to spend three or four hundred dollars on a vocoder, I'd probably
forgo the MAM's slightly better vocoding quality and still opt for the SE70,
just because it does so much other good stuff, like cool ring mod with MIDI
control over carrier frequency, excellent Leslie simulation, etc.

Has anybody peeked inside one of those MAM units?  I wonder what they're using
for bandpass filters and for VCA's.  I can't imagine they are using NE570's as
in the PAIA unit, because it sounds ten times better.  Nevertheless, they must
have been clever with the parts count and part choices, in order to keep the
price down.

BTW, you can get a KILLER Stephen Hawking voice-synthesis effect with the MAM,
just by talking and twisting the VCO tuning knob up and down along with your
speech pattern.  Of course, it helps to say stuff like "If the universe is
indeed spatially infinite, or if there are infinitely many universes, there
would probably be some large regions somewhere that started out in a smooth
and uniform manner.  It is a bit like the well-known horde of monkeys
hammering away on typewrters - most of what they write will be garbage, but
very occasionally they will type out one of Shakespeare's sonnets." (all while
wildly twisting that VCO knob)

and speaking of typing garbage....

Michael Bacich