a7thson

I'm in the US and mine arrived yesterday. International mail to the US used to be much faster, but protecting America takes time and (lots of taxpayers') money. I had a package containing three single INWO trading cards shipped from Australia shipped off to me in January and it took almost a month for that to arrive. You're in America - so be patient and trust your government - EVERYTHING IS UNDER CONTROL (of a multinational elite corporatocracy). Anyway, thanks Wilba! Someday I will even put them to use :-)

Very Cool! Thanks for sharing this find. Ordered two of them and a couple other small parts to raise the order above their (reasonable) $10 minimum order. Sure, it's not as nice as a white-on-blue Crystalfontz or something, but it's also 1/10th the price and will work great for testing the mbsid, at the least, when I get to that point. Again, thanks, cheapskates like myself appreciate it :-)

ooh, I like your color scheme! unfortunately I use Linux and code with vim and/or SCiTE (which I think Notepad++ shares an uncanny similarity to)... any chance of getting the colors somewhere, hopefully in some sort of RGB format, so I can translate them to custom font settings?!

Simpler question: how similar/dissimilar are the audio input path/modulation options in comparison to the standard Evolver? Can audio path be directed to one or a multitude of the 4 evolvers essentially inside the poly? I know, I know, I could just download the manual :-) Some might try and make a full-fledged control surface update (thinking more of the M6R here than the 1000 rack) of some sort. The M1000 stores its patch names internally, they just aren't displayed (of course) due to the obvious display limitations. Again, just another possible option. Yes, it's all on the same AC outlet, all the gear is plugged into one of those Monster home theater "line conditioner" / glorified surge protector things. But even with nothing other than the Matrix 1k itself plugged in, it still hums. I managed to dig up the reference, it's the Analogue-Heaven list archives: (http://elists.resynthesize.com/analogue-heaven/2002/07/323573/-Matrix-1000-hum-suggestions....html). cool... I would have to do some research to find out if the 'slow envelopes' are a CPU-related issue or a hardware one... again probably the limitations of the processor they used, and I'd doubt it's the fault/limitation of the CEM voice chip itself. but definitely that would be an area to focus effort on as well. so... sysex response time and faster envelopes or replacement envelopes (depending on the nature of the problem) as the 2 major priorities so far in our vaporware retrofit/firmware upgrade :D One of the complaints I read suggested in the commentary that the guy was intending to replace it with a K2500's keyboard, I hope that worked out for him! (see his description at http://machines.hyperreal.org/manufacturers/Oberheim/Xpander.Matrix-12/mods/matrix12.mods.txt) That would definitely make for one sweet performance instrument. I hear what you're saying about the Jupiter, luckily it's not such a hindrance thanks to MIDI controllers of course, but not the most compact solution (then again the Jupiter is not exactly travel-friendly in the first place, I'm sure!)

I know - I've been trying all morning, and finally got through period. So I'll make this short in case that changes. And of course it will artificially inflate my post count as a side effect. Needless to say it's quite annoying/frustrating, hopefully whatever is wrong gets solved soon. I guess I forgot the /sarcasm tag in the comment on presets btw... presets are huge business, even moreso perhaps, and hundreds of 'soundsets' out there of "teh lastest" soundz you must use if you are a top producer, naturally. :) Signal path info for replacing noise source with audio input on the M1000 is very interesting, can you toss me at some documentation on that? I'll laugh if it's on hyperreal and I just missed it. As for the humming M1000, I didn't mean I was getting audio noise, just that most 'hum' would be removed by my setup so I would not have noticed unless I plugged headphones directly into the unit; and through the Firepod or X-Station it is silence even when the unit is on and humming. I meant literally that the unit itself hums when in operation. Whether I plug it straight into the wall, through line conditioner, or into my UPS. I read somewhere it is a design flaw in their choice of transformer for the PSU and it's possible to replace but messing with power is not a hardware mod for a rank amateur like myself so I will just put up with the noise I guess. It's louder when the unit is horizontal; putting it at an angle reduces that for some reason - no idea whether it will run vertically even quieter or what, I've never tried it. Anyway, I'll try to address the rest of the comments in a few hours (with any luck, and assuming I can get onto the forum again!)

Right; nowadays it's totally different, no one uses presets and soundsets for 90% of music out there :P I watch Ebay regularly for Obies (and Q's, Evolvers, lots of others) for informational purposes via lots of saved searches... the 'bay definitely goes in cycles. Occasionally you even see a Matrix-12, and today, by sheer coincidence with our conversation, I see there is a Q+ being offered up, which is quite rare to see. Poly-Evolver is interesting (4 Evolvers in one box) and seems to have audio input; I'm assuming one can direct audio through a single Evolver module then, and utilize its filters (or use the input audio as a mod source of course) while still having 3 Evolver modules free -- that would be quite a setup, really! Back on the concept of a retrofitted Matrix-1000, though - it's definitely a concept that would appeal to a lot of DIY enthusiasts. Despite its 3-digit display, M1000 patches are all named (cryptically, sure, but still...), and of course with the sysex issue remedied, so an enhanced display is not entirely out of the question (nor would be a control surface for the truly ambitious), and the synth would be fully controllable and tweak-friendly for realtime work. The existing patch storage is probably quite adequate but there is no reason [given that we're already writing our own firmware here :D so what the heck] not to support a bankstick or the like for patch storage. It could be hard to remove the biggest complaint about the Matrix-1000 (or at least the black-faced model like mine), the power-supply hum, but in terms of just the audio output of course, plugging it into my Firepod (balanced inputs and pretty good pre-amp) seems to take care of that quite nicely, and even the X-Station's balanced stereo inputs cleans the signal of any noticeable hum. The unit itself, of course, still hums in the rack :D but luckily mine is not terribly loud. A quick question before I leave this aside for awhile - does the M12 suffer from the same issues with regard to envelope speed and the sysex bottleneck of its little cousin M1000/M6R? They don't share near the "genealogy" of the M12 and Xpander (father and son?) so would assume the product lines were developed fairly independently from one another? Also, how do you rate the keyboard and key response on this thing -- I've been reading up on it in the past few days (for obvious reasons) and one of the complaints seems to be the cheap feel and response of the keyboard. I also see in the specs there are no provisions for external audio in/out, so [unfortunately] no chance to use its versatile filters to process ext. audio sources, which is too bad. Main reference I found was the hyperreal archive: http://machines.hyperreal.org/manufacturers/Oberheim/Xpander.Matrix-12/ ... Google turns up far more links to a Matrix 12 fish-finder, but Oberheim and/or Xpander made the keyword a lot more productive :-D

I'm one of them! I couldn't bring myself to trash my old C64 either, and hate the idea of perfectly good hardware being ransacked for two chips, like a rhino for its horn, elephant for its tusks, shark for its fins, gorilla for its hands, etc. they're all perfectly good animals! Of course the hardware isn't alive (though some would argue otherwise :) ) ... nonetheless when I could buy a working Commodore on the 'bay for $15 and sell one chip inside for $20 to a wider market than the original hardware and at 1/8 to 1/10 my actual shipping cost for the C64 breadbox+PSU, the economic equation was pretty simple to junk the rest. It's changing somewhat and C64 prices have risen, but there are still hundreds of thousands out there. No idea how many M1000 / M6R's may be out there. Agreed. Another issue here is the fact it IS old hardware and that stock would be needed for everyone, *including* the DIY-module builders. Keeping up the DIY-only, open-source philosophy would at least limit the commercialization, though speculative buyers are always a problem for any such market. Right, I mis-spoke a bit, in that I wasn't implying use of the original firmware (which is for our purposes a "black box" with little to no documentation or meaningful source code), just an emulation of that processor if necessary for precise timing issues or whatever else, in order to avoid sync problems. I was assuming with a whole-number multiplier, stepping down the timings accordingly (i.e. processor runs at A, emulator runs at 3A, certain clock signals need to be emitted 3x slower than emulated CPU etc) would be fairly easy... then again who wants to work on that old processor? You're probably right that the 'brain' can simply be replaced - of course whatever hardware was dependent upon idiosyncracies of its behavior or timing would have to be worked around. And I am guessing that they had to play with a lot of clever hardware tricks for performance to make this work back in the day it was engineered. Still is, when you think about it, for vintage pseudo-analog! These M1000's go for $150-220 regularly on Ebay. It's about the price range of the AN200 or a DarkStar XP2 territory. Those are good little synths but a lot more specialized/limited than a programmable M1000 in many respects.

Agreed about the Xpander (which as I understand it is basically half an M12 :D) and M12 - The superior specs are self-evident of course, and we'd expect superior sound in a large majority of cases at least. As for a 'hardware replacement' - yes, I had the same thought... it would be very affordable and the existing hardware would make for an incredible little synth. This would have quite different application - upgrade/"turbocharge" an existing architecture with minimal invasiveness to the original hardware - than simply building from scratch a synth based on six CEM3396 chips. It is probably too much to ask to actually make it literally compatible with the existing M1000 with minimal modifications, though that would be the ideal. Maybe you could even emulate the original CPU at several times the original's operating speed if the hardware would support being driven at a higher rate (which I suspect would be the case), then have practically a drop-in replacement :D ... maybe. I don't know enough to properly limit my speculation. Only two things I don't like about the idea... the body count for perfectly good M1000 and M6R's, and the limited supply of CEM3396 chips to DIY with as a viable alternative to gutting a functional synth in order to pull them. Though I suspect if you managed to do it, these 'moral' objections would be quickly superceded!

Yeah, I found that out for myself shortly after posting this. I'd love to see such a beast as the Q+ rack! I just noticed in that Q+ post's pictures, it looks like you have a Poly Evolver rack as well... Another synth that packs a lot of punch, I'm sure. Yes, I'd absolutely like your opinion on it. The 'desktop' form-factor is a point against it, I like rack-mounts for what ever strange reason, but that is ultimately a pretty minor thing. Granted the VC is called 'desktop' but it's the 19" form factor with a rackmount kit, if you want to give up several units of rackspace that is! In that it's similar to Q rack I guess, while Blofeld is more like AN200 or Evolver in size. To tie us back to the original thread on the Matrix... ok, what Oberheim did with those little Toshiba 1Mhz chips in the M1000/M6R is admittedly damn impressive, but I can't help wondering what could be done with a more modern microcontroller driving all those classic CEM3396's across their analogue paths and perhaps making it more suitable to realtime control (I doubt you can remove the "slow" envelope limitation easily though). I've no doubt it would be quite a project... but what a great possibility for a retro synth, and it could be housed in the case that's built like a tank :-D M1000/M6R just seems to have this glossy mellow quality to it, whether it's due to the 4p filter or relative purity of the initial DCO waveforms - i.e. it's magic :D Is something like this even a remote possibility for some gifted soul out there?

LOL, yeah, and it seems Flying Rhino is back! (http://www.flyingrhino.co.uk/) With most of their back catalog available as free mp3 downloads, and asks for charitable donations to a human rights cause in Goa, India. I just found this info myself (and nearly salivate at the prospect of all that vintage goa!). I have a few early Koxbox albums (not Dragon Tales though!) and some other artists, a small collection of ~40-50 CDs of psy/goa/psy-ambient, with 4-5x more if you like crappy Napster-era 128kbps mp3's... Decidedly lacking in earlier UK/European psy though. Oh, and MHO - I don't think there is anything equal to early Infected Mushroom albums, especially including later Infected Mushroom albums, nor anything comparing to "Are You Shpongled?" :-D Not a lot of music outside certain highbrow "real music" amazes me, but those are exceptions to the rule. Cool, let me know how that goes... It sounds like that would certainly add some depth. That's definitely possible in the C's mod matrix. I will try something with that on the "C" when I get the ambition -- not to push us even more off-topic, but I pulled out Wasteland (the old RPG) on Dosbox this weekend due to our crappy weather grounding me, and needing some escape... well, it's been eating every spare moment since Friday night - talk about an addicting game! I even brewed up some late-night coffee just so I could keep playing last night... and am currently paying the price for that @ work as I stare off into space.. and find myself thinking about Wasteland! :D I like the idea of the Voyager, but yes, the fact is it's got very limited areas of application for most things. But it does them like nothing else so they can charge (and get) that premium. I know what you mean on modulars,too - and, no, they're not exactly the acme of portability! I do have to ask though... what is the next bit of kit you're eyeing at the moment? Or is it just time to heal up from the M12 for a few months? :P I just bought some SIDs from Wilba (note to Wilba: payment sent :D ) and hopefully will get on with finally buying and building a kit soon enough... the Q will have to wait for at least summer I'm afraid. btw, I'm being lazy not searching myself, but is there such a beast as a Q+ desktop/rackmount? If so, I'm sure they're hard as the hills to find :( EDIT: as an aside, I found and listened to the Q+ patch you made.... massive! But it would really dominate any mix unless you were making drone ambient stuff. It's similar to problems with patches I like that were cooked up on the Virus... I love subtle use of panning and the VC has an awesome chorus if you use a small amount and mod the panning env ever-so-slightly, from the same source, but the subtlety gets lost when you add in other instruments and sounds cluttered. We can blame the damned limitations of the human brain to process sound I guess? OK, Time to appear productive for a couple hours...

LOL, overused cliches - of such things the commercial world is made :-D but I do agree. still continually I'm amazed at the versatility of what is such a seemingly simple synth (the three-oh-three) can be abused for without just getting trite. I'm a big listener to oldskool goa-trance, and like modern psytrance for background noise at work or writing or coding at home :-) and Nord Lead is all over that stuff in somewhat the same way... it's a sameness, but it still grows on you. I think a non-TI Virus can get a pretty nice saw with Oscs 1 and two on slightly detuned saw, one octave apart, subosc on saw as well, then unison mode 3-5 voices and FX to add a short delay that backs off quickly and has high feedback. It's not a JP8000 but it isn't bad at all. Virus can certainly be "phat" but I had a fun surprise the day I turned Unison mode on the Matrix-1k while testing my X-station mappings, then hit a low register note while happening to be on a bass patch... kind of startling how "only" 6 voices can sound compared to 32 isn't it?! :) The TI does it quite differently with a dedicated waveshape, as I understand it, thus that thing can vomit them out from every voice. That said, I'm sure one can do neat stuff with the supersaw, as it's a very complex waveform and would sure make an interesting modulation source. Damn -- between just the Andy, Matrix-12, and Q+. you have almost every sonic potential you can think of out there sans a Moog Voyager and a Russian-built or DIY room-filling modular. Quite a synth aristocracy!!

this and the later comment about Jarre's endorsement (which Waldorf marketers should get a hold of and license :D) makes me more determined to make a Q (or, gulp, Q+) the next object of gearlust to victimize my bank accounts! The amazing thing with Obie Matrix-1000 and even moreso I'm sure with the Matrix-12, is that you just PLAY and, like magic, it sounds GOOD. Look into some of the better, great-sounding Virus patches and it's heavy FX and the mod matrix lights up like a christmas tree... point being you have to do a lot of work to make it sound good / non-cliche'd. sure... but if they sucked less, the vintage market would crash, and no one would feel the need to make DIY synths to fill the gap for those that can't afford to join the synth-aristocrats but also don't want to make commercial cookie-cutter sounds! rock, meet hard place... LOL. As for O/S, I went Linux five years back, concurrent for a year with XP on my laptop, then took the plunge and never looked back... but in music and in cutting-edge gaming, Windoze is light years ahead of Linux. also IMHO linux audio is full of ambitious but pretentious developers trying to make a perfect audio solution instead of something that just works for most cases. I had a mammoth reply penned, but will probably clean it up and redirect chunks of that to a PM so as to not hijack the thread too much. So mote it be, and thus ends post #7

The Virus-C was my first synth purchase (2006) and really more an impulse buy; luckily for me a good one. I like the standard filters (the add-on analog 2p,3p,4p sound very weak to me, but the '1-pole' which is great fun) but it seems all the good stuff is buried behind way too many menus. All the basic VA stuff, oscillator FM, wavetables and extensive modulation capabilities plus onboard FX... it can all be pretty overwhelming if you're just starting out. No wonder people stick to the stadium trance patches it's infamous for. I can't speak to using the NL but it's everywhere in psy/goa so maybe I'm missing out :) Plus for what it is I think they are overpriced, and the simpler and decade-old Nord Lead 1 and NL2 go for ridiculous sums on ebay. I actually really like the VC and got a sub-$800 deal on it - I'm just sore that I passed up a Q rack for it :) ah I recall a recent post of Q+ mods you made - very cool stuff - and recall a few things in the collection (MKS80, Andy) from previous posts etc. would be curious to hear/see some of what you've done with that and your other gear. LOL, right, I hear you there.... once I hit 30 (and hopefully have built the MBSID by then!), well, that's it, cold turkey... :D but yeah, you go in for vintage stuff, which as you note should be easier to recover costs on, assuming you find the right buyer etc. Chopin and Liszt managed to squish in six-notes per hand on occasion, but no, I doubt polyphony would come into question... And the Virus polyphony and newer VAs clearly have it beat (or the TI can just bleat out another digital Supersaw on 128-osc Unison mode, yawn) and as for playing... 32 notes is a lot of fingers :D yes - I thought something was wrong with mine actually, until I did some reading. it's not really usable either; experimental music, glitchcore if you gated it maybe... I run Linux exclusively (probably part of the reason I'm so unproductive at writing actual music again), Gentoo at that, so my options for software are... to put it kindly... rather limited. Jsynthlib, which has failed to do anything but display a blank screen on setup since I upgraded it, and a handful of command-line sysex tools. a patched pir8 copy of SoundDriver sort of works under WINE sometimes... it's abysmal. I've actually been thinking of rolling my own minimalistic patch editor that works in text mode. Since going Xmonad the GUI just doesn't appeal to me much anymore :D Digging through some of those factory patches showed me just how little I know about programming a synth!

Pardon as I pick up my jaw again :o Great photos! I'm somewhat stupified and am sure it's a joy to play with such a beast. Luckily I've lurked (see post count!) long enough to know that many synths have passed through your hands - is this one a keeper and for personal use?! Such a classic. I'd like you to elaborate on your comment about the Matrix 1000, if you could. I'd assume you would need/want two of them to get the same polyphony? Or are you saying the 12-voice polyphony isn't necessary to get a similar sound? Oh, and any tips for making that happen? ;) I ask because I've owned one of the older black-faced units for several months but never really liked the available software editors; consequently it has languished since my original hours of fascination with factory patches. It's sort of stirring to life again, though - two weeks ago I finally broke out the sysex and spent a day setting up a (still very rough and unfinished) template on my X-Station... giving me my first taste of its lagging and jerky real-time control - but also my first sounds of analog VCF transforming as it's moving to self-oscillation! ;D

Hi - I don't use Windows as much anymore, but you might try WinMerge, it's free and has a good set of features, see http://winmerge.org/ Mostly I just rely on colordiff when in Linux, I'm sure there's a version for Win32 but it's CLI not GUI. Some pluugins (if you install them) may complain if you don't have VB runtime crap but the program itself should work fine. Hope that helps, give it a try at least.

I don't mind the filter control so much (the waveform is annoying) - actually I was sold on this model due to the functional versus "here's a bunch of knobs and sliders, you figure it out" interface design, but it's a shame there were not a few "user-defined" encoders put in (my Virus C has two, and they're fully usable as input sources to the mod matrix, a feature I really like about it). I wouldn't have a use for more than a dozen or so of the factory patches but the KS synth engine inside it is pretty powerful so I'm looking forward to some knob tweaking; the inboard effects are quite nice and I like having a compressor right inside for a little bass/percussion postproduction done onboard :-) I would ask your opinion of the Nova but this is probably too far off-topic for getting too far into specifics, the polyphony of that or a KS4 or 5 might be a nice option to have. Reaktor might not be so bad for this actually. With Reaktor core you could probably do something fairly minimal, though it's still going to be a performance hit etc. Do keep me/us posted on this! Starting with JSynthLib and its MB-SID interface as a base may be an option too. But strangely though, I thought the original take on this was that the MIDIbox would stay away from NRPNs altogether so I'm a bit confused here -- quoting from the FAQ: "Oh, now you possibly come with the suggestion that NRPN should be used instead of CC --- no chance! One of my focus was always the capability to control all parameters via external sequencers/MIDI controllers (most of them cannot handle correctly with NRPN), and via Velocity/Aftertouch/Modulation Wheel/Wavetable. The assigned parameter numbers are stored in 7-bit registers, this limits the maximum number of parameters to 128"... so maybe this is really a non-problem from the developer's standpoint?? :-) Overkill, yes. It's use would be more along the lines of creating a "universal" layer with which to control several synths, yet without the inconvenience/clumsiness of having to manually switch X-Station templates etc. Probably some clever manipulation in the sequencer (sending the SysEx commands to switch templates at appropriate times) can accomplish this and more, so I'm not really excited about it for the price, any more than I was about "Hybrid Mode" on the XioSynth was a selling factor (oh, Hybrid Mode, looks like 'Local Control=off' does 90% of the same thing). I have now :-) Yes, the resemblance is definitely there but Evolver has a more compact design with more parameters and does it in a smaller space... I don't own an Evolver so I can't speak in terms of usability for programming the beast however. That said, I really like some of the ideas in this design, thanks for letting me know it's out there.

unfortunately yes. I dug around a bit for the old discussion where I read this, (http://createdigitalnoise.com/viewtopic.php?t=139&sid=a55c1fd340a6a0759c23365923b8e1b4) and found the actual quote: "In bad news, I learned recently (from Novation) that the X-Station does not send NRPN fine data and the SL series only sends it with the 8 endless rotaries. This probably affects very few people, but it does seem to rule out using them to edit Alesis Micron patches directly." So there is some support over X-Station, at least, but it's still not full operation. The thing I liked most about the X-Station over competing products was the layout of the buttons, I figure there won't be much reason to tweak i.e. the modulation matrix live - 3 osc, a filter, and 3 LFO controllers and possibly the filter and volume envelopes, should be sufficient for most anyone, I'd think - I for one wouldn't be brave enough to start re-patching on a live set anyway. I'm thinking that something already exists out there that works (commercial) or could be adapted (FOSS) and would be a lighter-weight solution than breaking out Reaktor's erector set, but it's definitely an option. I saw the product "Forte" by "Brainspawn" mentioned on an X-Station enthusiast group for a somewhat similar application. It is apparently a very programmable translation layer for MIDI controllers (www.brainspawn.com $129+$69 plugin... expensive) but I've never used the product; just passing along the information - there is a free demo available but it would be useless to me since I don't have a MIDIbox SID yet. Either way, though, this would be a great application for the X-Station or similar MIDI controller, with decent live-editing abilities on that, the MIDIbox-SID could be a very compact or racked design without having to tradeoff so much in terms of usability. As a side note, has anyone ever considered doing a MIDIbox-SID with just a patch matrix and set of encoders, like the Dave Smith Evolver?

unfortunately the X-Station cannot transmit NRPN fine data, only course (Novation has confirmed this and has no plans to alter it). Among other things this has resulted in ALesis (Micron, Ion) and some other synths being very limited in terms of controllability from an X-Station. I've not built a MIDIbox SID yet, but may have to stick with the older firmware depending on how control is implemented, or may have to give up the idea of using X-Station with it. High resolution / fine-grained control through NRPNs will require some kind of intermediary 'mapper' that does the translation layer for us. I'm not enough of a MIDI maven to know of such a product; perhaps it will have to be coded from scratch. I haven't yet dived into my X-Station enough to give a more-informed opinion of its capabilities.