[sdiy] Understanding 80s Synth Architectures

[grant musictechnologiesgroup.com]

I was also going to say Junglieb. He has most of his stuff online. The Prophet 5 technical manual would be great for this.

https://www.jungleib.com/

Also the Rhodes Chroma and Emu Emulator manuals should be noted for their detail. I'm sure there are other great ones too.

GB

------ Original Message ------
From: "Tom Wiltshire" <tom at electricdruid.net<mailto:tom at electricdruid.net>>
To: "Jared Anderson" <jarander at gmail.com<mailto:jarander at gmail.com>>
Cc: "Synth-Diy mailing list" <synth-diy at synth-diy.org<mailto:synth-diy at synth-diy.org>>
Sent: 2/4/2022 2:53:39 AM
Subject: Re: [sdiy] Understanding 80s Synth Architectures

I second Hal Chamberlin's book as a great resource, but I'd also say that I learned most from reading old service manuals. The Sequential ones by Stanley Junglieb are particularly good and give an overview of how the system works before diving into the details.

Tom

==================
       Electric Druid
Synth & Stompbox DIY
==================



On 4 Feb 2022, at 10:31, Jared Anderson via Synth-diy <synth-diy at synth-diy.org<mailto:synth-diy at synth-diy.org>> wrote:

Hello,

You might like to try to get a hold of a copy of "Musical Applications of Microprocessors" by Hal Chamberlin.
There may be PDFs floating around on the net somewhere...

Cheers

On Fri, 4 Feb 2022 at 11:25, ackolonges fds via Synth-diy <synth-diy at synth-diy.org<mailto:synth-diy at synth-diy.org>> wrote:
Hi Everyone,

As the local SDIYer I sometimes get asked to try and fix synths from the 80s like various Rolands, Korgs, Oberheims etc. and I generally just try to pinpoint the rough area of the issue and replace logic chips until the issue is resolved...

Most of these synths have a CPU connected to everything via a parallel address bus and a parallel data bus, with all sorts of glue logic chips doing various things. They also usually just have 1 DAC, time-domain multiplexed to all of the different parameters via more logic chips.

Obviously this is very different to the modern ways that microcontrollers and DACs are used in synths, and since I wasn't around in the 80s, these older architectures are very foreign to me. To aid in my troubleshooting efforts, I would love to better understand the details of how these architectures work, so I was wondering if anyone on here would be able to point me to any resources that could explain these types of systems to me, be they websites, articles, or books?

Thanks a lot for any advice you might have.
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