[sdiy] Ridiculous price for Paia synth

[Benjamin Tremblay]

There will always be a place in my heart for PAiA.  I loved getting those weird catalogs back in the 1970s, so very different from the HeathKit catalogs. 

When they got into CEM chips the work was really good. They showed us how to get mileage out of these generic chips.

However, most of their modules and stand-alone synths were clearly the result of a strange design philosophy: 
!) Design the very simplest proof-of-concept circuit. It’s done when it demonstrates the theory/concept of this synthesis feature.
2) Spend the rest of your time designing a kit from the cheapest sourced parts, streamlining the assembly/test procedures.
3) Write an article for one or more DIY magazines. 

A UJT VCO (yeah the Moog used a UJT). A 1-pole lowpass gate. A Twin-T Filter controlled by a single diode. An OTA-based state-variable filter with a switchable bank of capacitors to give it range. Really pretty good quality potentiometers and knobs. Good silkscreening. 

And, kits so cheap and weird you just had to buy one to see how they did it: The Hex VCA. The Gnome. The Wind Chimes (really cool and super-inexpensive).

But yeah. When you’re done learning, what do you with what you have learned? You learned a lot of theory reading through their literature. When it came to straightforward modules like a VCA or ring modulator, the learning was foundational. When it came to VCFs and VCOs, you would have to un-learn the PAiA way. It’s not just that it wasn’t 1V/octave, it’s that corners were cut in ways even the most lenient artist would notice. I’m not talking about nit-picky double-E things, I’m talking about the little things that wreck your mix.

I purchased a couple of their rack-mount mixer kits. They were okey, but always had a pretty high noise floor. The schematic showed me why: The pre-amp stage had a fixed (high) gain for each channel. All that noise was adding up.

I purchased a full set of the MCVI and MIDI Mux cards. It took me two years to figure out an extra capacitor on the board would make it stable enough to run. When I finally was able to start wiring up the Mux cards to external devices, it was a revolutionary moment in my learning: Golly, computers could control things, for real.  http://www.benjamintremblay.com/retro/audio/moretracks/Love_In_Condominiums.mp3 <http://www.benjamintremblay.com/retro/audio/moretracks/Love_In_Condominiums.mp3>


Benjamin Tremblay
btremblay at me.com
330 Fiske Street
Carlisle, MA 01741
978-831-8315
http://www.linkedin.com/in/bentremblay







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