the demo’s did it for me..
well, and a friend phoning me up to say he has a whole pile of C64’s and wants me to make a midibox sid from them.
too bad his pile were mostly VIC20’s >:(
I have loved the sid sound since my childhood… As a hobbyist musician, for years I wondered how cool it would be to actually play those sounds realtime. Then in 2004, I stumbled upon an auction on a Finnish auction site, where someone was selling off his MidiBox kits. Then I started googling, and in the early 2005 my MBSID was alive. 8)
By the way, my 2x8580+1x6581 is getting a second 6581 in the near future (I’m in the process of building the module on veroboard…)!
I remember having a c64 when I was really little (5-6). Granted, I’m only 19 now so the thing was pretty outdated even then, But I loved it all the same. When it died it was forgotten about for years, until I discovered Machinae Supremacy and fell madly in love with the SID once again.
And now I’m here.
Haven’t built one yet, but I’ve got 8 SIDs on order from Wilba, and I’ll be ordering some parts kits shortly.
Okay, i did have a c64 and there is the nostalgia element there.
I havent built a midibox sid yet, but from hearing the online demos,
and comparing them to my Novation KS-4, (my first and only current synth)
i must say that the SID chip sounds so much warmer, and has more life to it, its got this really nice kick in the balls about it.
Its like it sounds more emotional, and my VA synth sounds more cold.
I guess it could be the fact one is digital and one is analog thats the reason, but i honestly think the sid is so much more appealing to me.
Never had a C64, though a friend once asked me to make him a sampler out of a VIC-20. I bought an expansion board, extra RAM, a machine code monitor cartridge, and spent a lot of time finding out that it was too slow to do anything useful, (I think I managed something like 5 seconds of 8KHz sample rate) Then the Greengate DS3 came out.
Found MIDIbox whilst looking for control surface info, read up and just wanted to build them all…
I had a BBC Micro, back in the day - still have some too. I must try and get the ‘Music 500’ unit I have working again, this was a BBC driven hardware digital synth, but most of the time sounded the wrong sort of cheesy.
I borrowed a friend’s Elektron Sidstation and sometime after I returned it realized how much I missed it. I was searching for one to buy and I came across Ucapps and the MB-6582. So building has begun and I no longer care about finding a Sidstation.
OT, I know, but talking of the SIDStation, I read somewhere that Elektron bought up most the the remaining stocks of 6580 SID chips. The SIDStation is ridiculously underpowered compared to the MIDIBox SID, particularly a v2 with 4 Stereo channels!
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