[sdiy] MOTM board saga

[Paul Schreiber]

> To be honest the Synthesis Technology story sounds pretty amazing to me, 
> didn't Paul start it up after he joined the SDIY list? I mean from just a 
> concept to being visited by Buchla at NAMM, inspiring stuff.

a) My original idea was to 're-invent' Electronotes, and have a blank board with 
every 'issue'. On a whim, I called Doug Curtis (whom I had worked closely with 
while at Tandy on DVM ASICs, nothing synth related) and found out he had stashed 
all the CEM chips.

b) Next, I dug up all the old Digisound documentation. These were UK modules 
that used CEM chips. Mostly they were taken straight off the CEM app notes. I 
also contacted Craig Anderton, Dave Rossum (EMu) and Thomas Henry. I thought it 
would be cool to have a different person each month have a circuit, which is 
where the "Module of the Month" came from (although I never liked that tag, I 
then 're-wrote' MOTM as Mother of all Modulars).

c) When I started on AH and SDIY, I got TONS of feedback indicating that folks 
rather I provide the CEM ICs for repair/DIY as opposed to using them in 
modules.Well, that shot down any hopes of even a Module of the Quarter, because 
I could easily do 2-4 modules at 1 time using CEM ICs (I mean, a VC ADSR is like 
12 minutes to layout with a CEM3310).

d) I was worried about what to do next. I then decided that, if nothing else, to 
sell *just a few* modules so I could get a decent stereo. I always had *crappy* 
stereos (by decent, I have a Mark Levinson 383 pre-amp/power , Rotel 971 CD and 
B&W 803 speakers). So I tooled up the MOTM-100 S&H/Noise and the MOTM-900 power 
supply. I was fortunate because a few years earlier, I was designing speech DSP 
emulators for Texas Instruments on contract and had DOS pcb tools, schematic 
tools and AutoCAD. I also had a lab (scope, DVM, function generator, logic 
analyzer).

e) I then used selling of the CEM ICs to fund the tooling of the first 2 MOTM 
modules. All of my initial customers were from either SDIY or AH. I placed a 
tiny ad in Nuts & Volts magazine, and I think I got *one* customer because of 
it.

f) MOTM hit it's peak (and also another Peake, inside joke) in 2000-2001 when 
everyone had more $$$ to spend. I shipped around 820 modules in 2004 and about 
1000 in 2005 (although ~150 of those were free modules from early promotional 
days). I suspect this year, not counting Frac modules, will be around 650. There 
are now many players, and competition from software synths. Still play the 
stereo every day, and around June will hit module #7000 shipped. Not bad for a 
hobby.

Paul S.