heres the innards of one of waldorfs first products; the microwave rack rev. 1
8 voice analog/digital hybrid wavetable synth from 1990 odd..
a supprisingly potent little box if you program your own sounds and wavetables on it ..and the real filters sound quite nice ..tho not as fat as some. also in spite of the fact that the editing interface is a little scarce ..its not actually too bad to navigate for programming ! Also make sure you backup your patches on this synth; it appears to use battery backed ram & may loose your presets if the battery dies !
in all seriousness mind; these are well worth having & sell for peanuts atm.. and its not that far off being like the big daddy keyboard versionā¦ (ā¦one day i shall have )
(1x) motorola - mc68000ps (16 bit, 12mhz processor (70,000 transistors also used in the first apple mac & atari st)
A quick warning: stick some labels over the windows on those EPROMās. Daylight will erase them as well as UV, just a bit more slowly. A camera flash gun can do the same - almost as fast as UV. If it were mine, and it had been a few days in open light ātoplessā, Iād be thinking of reading the EPROMās for safety backup, then re-writing them.
Thanks for posting this. Iām going to be keeping my eyes open for on, definitely, having seen the build.
..yes funnily enough it has crossed my mind lately to borrow a friends eeprom burner and back afew things up; as the matrix 1000 & afew other things also use them. the case went back on the microwave pretty sharpish mind ..as ive heard of this tendancy too..
btw on picking these up ..there are two revisions of the first microwave I ..one has the cem 3389 filters (the older smooth blue chassis here) ..and the latter with the funny textured paint, has the cem 3387ās, the same ones that are in the wave monster. however this later revision is reputed to not be as smooth sounding.
Also the microwave II has no analog filters at all; its all digital. and in this instance probably be better going for an XT ..its like a mw II on steroids, has a ton more knobs & a fair few more bells and whistles.
pick these odd sounding monsters carefully, look after them and theyll serve you well
ah the hifi crowd ā¦if you told them plain earplugs painted green with neat little silver tassles would improve their sound ā¦theyd take your word for it & buy them in droves (at 8000% the cost price )
..tho yes there is a nice quality to 12 bit dacs ..notably the early prodigy records where produced & sequenced entirely on a roland w30 keyboard which had 12bit dacs and a nice crunch to it
The early Philips/Marantz CD players had a 14 bit D->A with samples cranked out at 4 times the normal bitrate. They sounded way better and smoother than their contemporary 16 bit machines. This of course was in the days before bitstream type converters, and where the laser trimming of the 16 bit D->Aās was well inside the bit accuracy. The best advantage was that they could throw away the horrible ābrick wallā anti aliasing filter, with all itās attendant passband ripple problems and ringing, and replace it with a nice smooth simpler filter, rolling off from the much higher frequency.
A lot of the quality effects in some of the high end converters come from creative use of dither in the low bits. A pattern locked dither can introduce artefacts of its own, but careful pseudo-random amounts can sound better. The old near legendary Cambridge converters used stacked Philips chips - four if I remember.
And we all know why ā24 bit audioā is a lie, donāt we?
For reference, by the way, dither and jitter are separate things.
I agree with the comment about the 12 bit Rolands - a positive accurately timed 12 bits can sound more nameitive than time splattered 14 bits or more.
Iām with you on the earplugs line: a friend has just spent ĆĀ£200 on some braided speaker cable - and the makers say it has to be ārun inā, which I think is a crafty way to get outside the guarantee period. Donāt get me started on zero feedback triode class A ampsā¦
I got one of these in for repairs last year. (Some bad caps and a bad regulator and a couple blown CEMs.) It was originally a 220v unit that made its way here to the States. Anybody know where I can get a 110v power supply for this thing?
on the note of ābit ditheringā ā¦bob katz the mastering producer had alot to say about this in a recent book of his & in recent articles.. yup random dithering of lower bits is the way to go.. it actually helps retain sub-bit audio information !
24bit ? ..do tell
whilst im quite well aware that consumers rarely manage to make use of the 90db headroom 16 bit audio offers & that alot of shoddy consumer devices fail to even practically use this headroom ..what else is to be told ? ..iāve probably read past it already.. but i wasnt awake that day
mind 24bit, excessive samplerate recording is useful from a sound engineers perspective; it gives lots of leeway & down dither to chisel out an exceptional quality 16bit mix ā¦and in live situations allows for the full headroom of 130db or so ā¦for silly dynamics capabilityās & plenty of leeway for live digital mix busses..
picking on the hi-fi crowd as one crowd Iād avoid that, much to read out there, written by EEās.
Sure, if you dont understand shit, they rip you off like no tomorrow thats how it goes.
On the other side of the coin, I bought the 1994 Prism dScope from a former newspaper writer, for about 50 Usd on ebay, the new version goes for 12000ā¦
The TDA1540 and 1541 are bugged, the dynamic element matching never worked out as expected. The only top tier gear using TDA afaik are the Quantec ā¦ R2r, Laser trimming is better. Double precision, phase optimised oversampling is also good ;D
Sorry about the packing jobā¦ I had wrapped the transformer in bubble wrap and was expecting it to be packed in one of those cardboard priority mail boxes we get at the post office. It got put in an envelope instead. :-[ Glad it got to you though!
I recently had a guy send me 10 soldering iron tips in a normal paper envelope. The post sorting machine choked on them, and they arrived bent, in a ball of sticky tape with a note from the post office.. Yup, bent. Iād love to see what the machine looks like
..and the real filters sound quite nice ..tho not as fat as some. also in spite of the fact that the editing interface is a little scarce ..its not actually too bad to navigate for programming ! Also make sure you backup your patches on this synth; it appears to use battery backed ram & may loose your presets if the battery dies !
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