Chip sitting??!?
1999-09-17 by Paul Schreiber
Now, THAT was unfair. Actually, I found them in Doug Curtis' storage shed, under 2 still-in-the-taped-boxes Teac reel-to-reels. Believe me, if I had these 2 years ago, I'd be driving a Lexus! On a side note, I did see his personal, modular synth. Very interesting: it was laid out like an old SSL mixer. Each "voice" was about 4 inches wide and about 20 inches long. They were on card-edge connectors, so you could plug them in and out. Each voice had a large, big $$$ slide pot with 6 small push on/push off buttons. The switches assigned the routing of the "performance slider" as it was labeled. Beautiful brushed aluminum panel, laser engraved! The voice "patch" was interesting: he used *very small" gold-plated pin jacks. These were popular 20 years ago in analog computer patch panels (the panels were removeable, held in place by a massive "Socket 7"-like ZIF doo-dad) Anyway, each voice had like a matrix of female sockets, *very* much like a VCS3 pinboard. Except, these small jumpers, 2-4" long, made the patches. The sockets are only about 0.050 diameter, so density is not an issue. Also, he had the patch matrix recessed about 2 inches from the other "surface", with a smokey Plexiglas cover. Sort of like the "hidden" presets on a CS-60/CS-80 synth. Didn't hear it (it's "straight" 3340>>3379>>3310 so it's like an OB-8, I'd guess). Sucker is 7 FEET long and very bizarre! Future eBay oddity??!? Also saw his synth #0001. Doug's history is: he entered a design contest for analog ASICs. He won, got $5000 and a run of 500 chips of his design. Which was his later-patented bipolar exponential converter cell, the basis for every CEM chip. The 500 chips went into 5 different synths (including a guitar synth with 6L6 tube outputs!) and the $5000....started Curtis Electromusic! Paul S.