Wiardgroup

I should mention a bit about the genesis of the Wiard modules.

The designs originated in 1995-1996 with input from the MEME 
group.

At that time there was only Doepfer and Serge actually making 
modules. MOTM, Modcan, Blacet(new) and all the others have 
started up since then.

80% of all modules ever designed use 1/8" (3.5mm) connectors. 
This includes Aries, ARP, Buchla, Blacet (original), Doepfer, 
Roland 100(m), PAIA, Digisound and others. At that time, the only 
user of banana connectors was Serge and 1/4" was Moog 900 
and Roland 700.

Banana connector are rated at 15 amperes at 5,000 volts or 
75,000 watts theoretical capacity. 0 dB is 1 milliwatt into 600 
ohms, so banana connectors are overated by 750,000%

Now the nice thing about bananas are that they stack. But there 
is no reason why a stacking 3.5mm connector could not be 
made. However no one has. This indicates there is a lack of 
demand for a stacking shielded connector.

So the obvious choice was 3.5mm connectors in order to be nice 
to our customers and make the modules as compatible as 
possible with the most existing equipment. Also the switches 
are essential to the ability to do a custom normalized patch 
which is built into each module (all the solder pads on the back 
of the jack boards are for you to use).

The design goal was to produce a system that could be 
assembled by a single person in reasonable production 
quantity. Since sales were not expected to exceed 500 modules 
(bearing in mind that Don said there are a total of 450 Buchla 
200 series modules ever assembled) and the maketplace was 
expected to be the same size as the Buchla 200, which the 
Wiard most closely resembles.

So the design decisions were in order to make production 
possible at all. As it worked out, these impacted minimally on the 
audio performance. While there is some capacitive coupling 
between function blocks inside modules, the signal to noise 
ratios is better than -60 dB. Since signals run at +10-20 dB 
internally, once padded down, the equivilent signal to noise ratio 
is -70 dB or better and typical of good quality analog audio 
systems.

In retrospect, having now the benefit of all the other module 
designs which have come since 1995, I would have had to do 
things exactly the same way. We recently did a cost benefit 
analysis of changing the design (banana connectors or 1/4"). 
And in all cases production cost went UP. The designs are 
simply the most cost effective way of bringing this massive 
flexibility to such a small, light weight package.