[sdiy] Famous Fixed Filters - FFF PCB ?

[Michael Zacherl]

On 04.12.2007 12:49 Uhr, Derek Holzer wrote:
> The Subharchord was the first thing I thought of when Jürgen presented 
> the idea... The filters aren't exactly fixed, however, they have a range 
> within which each filter can be set by the keyboard. From my original 
> post on it:

whoops ... I should have gone through my mail backlog.
Now I found your original post, sorry!

> It has an incredible sound, to be sure!

yes, its kinda special.
It needs a trained hand to get it sounding good, as we could see on the 
demo. I did a little video with my digicam but the sound quality is poor 
and the sounds themself appear cheap since obviously there was no time 
to set the Subharchord up properly.
Regrettably they only were just about to scratch the surface when 
demoing unit # 2/68.
There was one moment during the demo where the Subharchord was tuned 
through some formants, a sound which really caught my interest.
Unfortunately the speaker volume was very low at this moment and you can 
barely hear it on the recording.  :-(

> Jürgen's response was pretty positive, but I don't know if (like the 
> Buchla Spectral Processor I also mentioned) it would fit into the spec 
> of what he has planned. 

Well, I wouldn't mind this being a separate project ;-)
OTOH the tough part would be getting it to sound "right".
It's just coils and caps none of the ferrites are available etc.
How to check if it hits the original sound?
The restored unit which was shown here retained many of the original parts.
I for my part don't insist on 100% clones as long as a unit sounds 
distinctive and/or interesting and/or at least has some potential to do 
so. But that's to everyones taste.
I can't tell if it makes sense to develop some sort of "general purpose 
circuit" which can be built x-times in order to get a MEL-filter bank.

> But, with your email, that's two votes for the 
> Subharchord.

;-)

    Michael.