--- In motm@y..., revtor@a... wrote:
> Guys, here's a great Emu modular link..lots of info and nice pics.
> Some neat module features and some surprising similarities with
> MOTM. (Surprise or coincidence Paul..?? : )
I found this site a year or more ago. I'm disappointed to see that he
hasn't added any of the pics he's missing since then. I still have my
Dec. '78 Emu technical catalog, which is the source for all that
site's pics and text.
Emu was a class outfit all the way. They had the finest user
interface I've ever seen, bar none. Their component selection, the
mechanical construction, and the designs were top notch - head and
shoulders above anything else available at the time. It was expensive
as hell, but Dave and Scott would sell you the essential circuits as
potted submodules for WAY cheaper, which allowed me to build my first
synth in '73. The only electronics experience I previously had was
working on Hammonds, but Dave introduced me to the mysteries of
summing node opamps over the phone - talk about tech support!
Hmmm - finest parts, great design and tech support - yep, that sounds
like the MOTM philosophy all right.
The only complaints I've ever heard leveled against the Emu modular
was that the sound was "too clean", and that it was so damn big.
Well, it didn't sound like a Moog, but I always loved the sound of
mine. The size resulted from their philosophy of input and output
mixers on each module, and you sure didn't care about the large size
when you found that patching it was a dream.
Are there echos of Emu modules in MOTM design? Well, I hope so. In
the early days of this list, we debated user interface design of
various modules much more avidly than we tend to now. I'm sure I made
people weary extolling the features on the Emu version of this module
or that. The lag processor is an example of an Emu influenced module
(features not design), but with an extra MOTM twist. If you look at
my SuperMoe sequencer designs, they are heavily influenced by the
modular Emu sequencer approach. It's unfortunate that the site
doesn't have pics of the sequencer modules up.
Moe