[sdiy] Hard Sync on DCOs

[Tom Wiltshire]

On 9 Nov 2011, at 23:13, Rainer Buchty wrote:

> On Wed, 9 Nov 2011, Paul Maddox wrote:
> 
>> Hard Sync is a bit of a one trick pony IMHO... it's easy to do with digital oscillators, but how "useful" is it musically? It might be better to invest the time, and front panel space, in another feature?
> 
> No, why?
> 
> After all, hard sync is not only good for EOOOOW-like sounds, but also great for getting "any-wave PWM". Sure, it eats up 2 oscillators, but since it comes essentially for free I'm rather amazed that not all phase-accu based machines offer hard sync.
> 
> And with regard to front panel (or menu) space -- it's just a switch.

The aliasing is a pain if you do it the simple way digitally. I agree it's free, but it sounds grim. There's Eli Brandt's famous paper about how to do it without making it sound grim - "Hard sync without aliasing" - but that's a lot more work.

But the DCO solution doesn't have that problem, and doesn't even eat up two oscillators. If you've got two DCOs, you can have them *both* doing sync independently. Scott/Richie might be right that you need decent CV resolution, but it seemed pretty promising at 12-bit when I tried it, though I never finished it off, only did a proof-of-concept.

T.