Korg Minilogue

[Daags]

I've already addressed this. I did read the translation

read the translation ?

It was linked.

not by me it wasn't (the written translation to which you appear to be referring). are you having trouble keeping up with who is saying what ?

[Daags]

Anyone from Europe whose synth has arrived yet? I have mailed Thomann in Germany but they are silent as the grave

I guess it is becaue they don't know when they arrives
I hve the same problem here with my local shop where they got their demo synth but not mine yet and i am no.1 on the list here.

This is in Norway

I'm in Denmark so I guess we are in the same boat. Would be polite if they would answer that they don't know. Well, politeness is not my strongest trait either, so I guess patience is the key word here.

I think Thomann are victims of their own success ? ... their customer support and after-sales service used to be second to none. Nowadays it leaves a lot to be desired imo/ime, and I find myself putting a lot more effort in to finding an alternative vendor for new stuff I may be purchasing, though I nearly always end up buying from Thomann anyways. But ya, it aint what it used to be.

[IncarnateX]

I think I just posted the vid you are referring to on the previous site, Daags. Am I right?

[ghettosynth]

I've already addressed this. I did read the translation

read the translation ?

It was linked.

not by me it wasn't (the written translation to which you appear to be referring). are you having trouble keeping up with who is saying what ?

The text of the interview with him where he discusses the circuit, briefly, is linked.
I've seen the interview that you're talking about, it's not as detailed as the linked interview that we're discussing.

[Mutant]

[3ee]

^awesome!

... also waiting paciently for the SonicLab review ^_^

[Uncle E]

some anonymous dude on a forum

ghettosynth deserves more respect than that. Also, a lot can be gleaned by looking at the circuit board, particularly when there are stand out components that don't exist in many other circuits.

Smart engineers borrow from other engineers' work. It doesn't make it any less of an original design, it just means he was smart enough not to waste time on things other people had already figured out.

[Daags]

some anonymous dude on a forum

ghettosynth deserves more respect than that.

it's just a matter of fact. to me - and possibly to the majority - he is just some anonymous dude on a forum, or am I missing something ? at any rate, feel free to give him 'more respect than that' (whatever that's supposed to mean ? pretending to know him, if you don't ?)

Not that my original point needs explaining, but to reiterate, Tatsuya - a synth designer already approaching cult status at a very young age, whose designs sell by the metric tonne & truck load - claims the minilogue is a brand new design, designed from the ground up using inexpensive and easily available components. Then some random guy (as far as I'm concerned, if you two are war buddies or something and he took a bullet in the ass for you - that's A-OK with me. no disrespect intended, sir) comes along getting all pedantic/semantic/hair-splitting disputing this claim.... so, who do I believe ? Hmmm. Well to me its clear.

If someone wants to illustrate that they know what a particular chip is, what it looks like, what it was used for commonly, and what it could be used for today, by all means go ahead - as I said we could all learn something from that regardless of the pedantic/semantic pissing contest motivation behind it.

ymmv.

[Daags]

I think I just posted the vid you are referring to on the previous site, Daags. Am I right?

Hi Incarnate, I wasn't ignoring you by the way ... I can't listen to audio at the moment but I will check it when I can and confirm

[Shy]

some anonymous dude on a forum

ghettosynth deserves more respect than that.

it's just a matter of fact. to me - and possibly to the majority - he is just some anonymous dude on a forum, or am I missing something ? at any rate, feel free to give him 'more respect than that' (whatever that's supposed to mean ? pretending to know him, if you don't ?)

Not that my original point needs explaining, but to reiterate, Tatsuya - a synth designer already approaching cult status at a very young age, whose designs sell by the metric tonne & truck load - claims the minilogue is a brand new design, designed from the ground up using inexpensive and easily available components. Then some random guy (as far as I'm concerned, if you two are war buddies or something and he took a bullet in the ass for you - that's A-OK with me. no disrespect intended, sir) comes along getting all pedantic/semantic/hair-splitting disputing this claim.... so, who do I believe ? Hmmm. Well to me its clear.

If someone wants to illustrate that they know what a particular chip is, what it looks like, what it was used for commonly, and what it could be used for today, by all means go ahead - as I said we could all learn something from that regardless of the pedantic/semantic pissing contest motivation behind it.

ymmv.

Since Tats himself said it uses 4 norton amps stacked in a configuration close to the ARP4075 filter, it's sensible to assume that he didn't arrive at that configuration merely by chance, but by having previous experience with the Odyssey reissue. Even if he did, the filter is still mostly similar in many ways (and not by chance) to earlier synth filters and borrows from the designs of others, so "completely new design" is not a true objective description. "Completely unique" would probably be far less objectionable.

[IncarnateX]

some anonymous dude on a forum

ghettosynth deserves more respect than that.

Why?

[ghettosynth]

Since Tats himself said it uses 4 norton amps stacked in a configuration close to the ARP4075 filter, it's sensible to assume that he didn't arrive at that configuration merely by chance, but by having previous experience with the Odyssey reissue. Even if he did, the filter is still mostly similar in many ways (and not by chance) to earlier synth filters and borrows from the designs of others, so "completely new design" is not a true objective description. "Completely unique" would probably be far less objectionable.

Pretty much, and since it cannot be objectively true, it can mean anything. I don't really care what he meant by it, or how far the design is from the Arp, I just want to know about the circuit.

[JCJR]

It is fun hearing you knowledgeable people talking about this stuff

So far as I can tell Ghettosynth is knowledgeable and has kept up with the details into modern times. Not so much with me. I was into it back in the 1970's and 1980's, gradually shifting from hardware to software over the 1980's, almost entirely software by the 1990's. Am quite out of date on hardware, and possibly mis-remember many hardware details. Not that I ever acquired much skill with software either.

Listening to all the minilogue demos, it doesn't sound like an arp.

There must be more to the sound of an arp than just the filter or what?

Hi IncarnateX. Yeah, I didn't mention it previously so could be confabulation. But listening to the many audio demos, it seemed to sound a little more "Arp-ish" than Oberheim-ish, SCI-ish, Moog-ish, or Roland-ish. I didn't mention this before because it seemed a silly thang to say.

Maybe it remains a silly thang to say. I like the Minilogue a lot from what I've heard. It definitely has its own sound so far as I can hear.

If Korg happened to borrow a concept or engineering approach from Arp it would not be plagarism. Folks borrow all the time. How many civil engineers would design a bridge which uses entirely new tech, with absolutely no reliance on tricks of the trade accumulated over thousands of years?

If somebody puts a moog ladder filter in a product, do people go shouting to the rooftops about plagarism? The people who like moog ladder filters would be applauding, not griping about it. It seems doubtful that every instance of a ladder filter uses exactly the same circuit. You could make a ladder filter many ways, with many different parts and wiring.

****

I didn't know about 3900's in Arp filters til Ghettosynth mentioned it. As previously stated, when I was paying attention, Arp was potting its filters in epoxy and not publishing schematics of their filters. I don't know if it was paranoia or face-saving pride or what-- Maybe I'm relating a factually inaccurate version of this tale-- When the 2600 was first released, the filter was potted, and was later discovered that the first version filter was a moog ladder, and there was a lawsuit over it, and Arp changed filter designs.

Maybe Arp truly wanted to keep the new filter secret, or maybe they just wanted to continue potting the filters to somehow prove to the world, "See, we are still potting filters. We definitely weren't potting filters simply because we were infringing on Moog." Or maybe potting was somehow good for the filter circuits, though that seems a far stretch.

After Arp, Moog and EML, everybody and his brother started making small runs of obscure mono synthesizers. Probably Arp didn't want to make it any easier than it had to, with public circuit hints which would give a leg up to all the garage-based competitors crawling out of the woodwork at the time.

****

So anyway that 3900 has always been an odd duck, but very interesting chip that can do things which most conventional opamps cannot. Very rugged. Very ancient design. Sometimes called "3900 automotive amp" possibly because it was intended for various slow automotive and industrial logic in unfriendly environments, dunno.

Not suited to extremely high frequencies. Fairly noisy. But what made it unique was that the inputs were basically ground referenced current mode "naked" differential transistor pair.

If you draw too much current out of the input transistors it can smoke the chip in a heartbeat, so normally you see 3900 circuits with surrounding resistor values in the megohm range. That filter circuit Ghettosynth posted, with an external differential pair feeding the internal differential pair, doesn't have giant resistor values, presumably because the external differential pair protects the 3900 input transistors.

It is just a cute chip because it can do so many tricks ordinary opamps can't, but rarely used for audio because most functions can be better done by conventional opamps. PAIA and some others in the early days would use 3900's in synth kits which did not get much respect, because the nature of the chip made it possible to create very low parts count circuits. In fact, because the 3900 was used in some inexpensive "toy" synth kits, might have made some folks back then prejudiced that it is too cheezy a chip to use in a serious "high quality" product.

I don't know if a 3900 would be useful for a precise-tracking audio frequency VCO, but you can make some crazy-low-parts-counts VCO's with the chip, and works fabulous for a voltage controlled LFO. I never used a 3900 to make an envelope generator, but suspect it might make a very good core for low-parts-count discrete ADSR circuits. That is a common 3900 usage in industrial context so far as I know, large-voltage slow analog circuitry with un-used sections of the chip useful as fairly-high-current-drive slow digital logic.

[Shy]

When the 2600 was first released, the filter was potted, and was later discovered that the first version filter was a moog ladder, and there was a lawsuit over it, and Arp changed filter designs.

Moog just threatened to sue them if they didn't stop using the ladder filter design, but years later, maybe also over the newer ladder-based filters (4034 and 4035) used in other ARP synths. There was never any known lawsuit. ARP's founder said "This isn't right. We really are infringing, and we shouldn't do this", so I guess there was never any debate with Moog.

[ghettosynth]

When the 2600 was first released, the filter was potted, and was later discovered that the first version filter was a moog ladder, and there was a lawsuit over it, and Arp changed filter designs.

Moog just threatened to sue them if they didn't stop using the ladder filter design, but years later, maybe also over the newer ladder-based filters (4034 and 4035) used in other ARP synths. There was never any known lawsuit. ARP's founder said "This isn't right. We really are infringing, and we shouldn't do this", so I guess there was never any debate with Moog.

Yes, people still refer to the moog filters as the lawsuit filters, even though there was no lawsuit. Potting circuits was common back then though. All of the Yamaha modules are potted in the CS-80 and the Marshal Time Modulator is a somewhat infamous analog delay that, AFAIK, held its schematicy secrets until the founder's death.