With All These Emulations Coming Out...

[pdxindy]

And any A6 sample library is fundamentally recordings of the synth at particular settings. Once sampled, much of the interaction that makes the instrument interesting has already been frozen. You can animate the sample afterwards, but you are animating a photograph of the system rather than operating the system itself.

Exactly... Samples entirely miss the lovely hands on experience of tweaking a sound to taste on the fly. They are static snapshots of a dynamic system.

[IvyBirds]

The A6’s variation emerges throughout the entire voice and signal path, including places the programmer may not have explicitly modulated.

In April of 2001 SOS magazine said the following and they were spot on

"Despite Alesis' claims to the contrary, the Andromeda 16-Voice Real Analogue Synthesizer (as they call it) is not a real analogue synthesizer — at least, not completely. Huge chunks of its architecture are digital, and I'm not only referring to the digital effects, the microprocessor-controlled operating system, or even the memories. No... the controllers in the sound-generation system — the envelopes, the LFOs, and the Sample & Hold — are all digital, as is the oscillator tuning (although not the oscillators themselves). This makes the Andromeda a hybrid analogue/digital synth"

https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/al ... -andromeda

If you take a look at the A6 service module you will see it has Motorola MCF5307 32-bit ColdFire microprocessor running at 90MHz as it's brain. That means when you talk about the envelopes they are 100% generated with a computer as digital data, when you talk about pitch you are 100% talking about digital data, every time you press a key the onboard computer reads that and generates digital data to say hey we need to play a waveform at 261.63 Hz because they pressed the C Key. Every point on every envelope is a piece of digital information, every LFO and modulation source is 100% generated as digital data and some of those are digital data manipulating other digital data in the CPU

From there the digital data is converted with Burr-Brown PCM54HP DAC chips.These are highly precise, 16-bit audio-grade DACs. These are not introducing any errors or variability

From the DAC chip the freshly created analog voltage gets routed to a capacitor where it's stored. The CPU cycles back around and re-charges ("refreshes") the capacitor with a updated voltage value. From there it goes to an Op-Amp which smooths everything out and from there to the VCA or whatever

Because the DAC chip must sequentially update parameter after parameter, the modulation signals sent to the analog chips are technically infinitesimally out of phase with one another. While they happen within microseconds, they do not hit the analog components at the exact same physical native time.

All of that means it's a 100% digital envelope that is being modulated by nature of how the DAC works alongside the capacitors and the op-amps so by shifting your sample playback times by microseconds per key press in a perceivably random way you also inherently make everything infinitesimally out of phase with one another with the exact same audible result

Beyond that of course is the effect that temperature can have here which is why with Andromeda, Alesis gave it an auto tune or auto calibration feature to deal with drift created by fluctuating temperatures. In a perfect world where the temperature would be 100% stable all the time you wouldn't need that, but essentially tempeture is acting here as a modulation source that can effect the frequency of waveforms coming out of the oscialtors. That's all it can do. If you press A keys it should output 110, 220, 440 Hz , etc but they drift and instead output perhaps 108, 222, and 439 Hz. Since tempeture is modulating that in a random way any random modulator can also do so and as long as it is doing so with same result regarding frequency it will have the same exact result.

And any A6 sample library is fundamentally recordings of the synth at particular settings. Once sampled, much of the interaction that makes the instrument interesting has already been frozen. You can animate the sample afterwards, but you are animating a photograph of the system rather than operating the system itself.

If you are talking about finished samples patches sure, but I am specifically talking about raw samples of the oscialtors. On Andromeda make the filter be wide open, turn off resonance, turn off the filter envelope, and on the VCA set sustain to 100, and everything else to 0. Set a single Oscillator to whatever you want and turn off the second one. Play it back and use a Ladder filter and/or SEM filter in Falcon or Omnisphere and apply the apply the Modulation I spoke of earlier and you will get remarkably close to an Andromeda. It won't sound exactly the same because Falcon and Omnisphere both do a significantly better job at modelling a Moog Ladder Filter, and an Oberheim SEM type filter than Andromeda does and they are not specifically trying to mimic the suspect job that Alesis did back in the day

Saturation can also be dialed in if that is an effect you are going for in a myriad of ways