TheAncientOne

One of the guys on the Electro-Music forum posted his 'knobs reference' page. I thought it might be useful here too. http://www.beavisaudio.com/techpages/Knobs/knobs.htm

I'm in for some of these too. I tried to get them through their UK agents, and didn't get very far - they sent me samples of the pointer type, but don't even acknowledge that the 401's exist. Having tried the pointer versions 300 and 400, I have to say my preference is for the 401's. I want to use them for my sequencer, otherwise, with larger knobs, I will have to do two row design to allow myself finger space. I could go for black or grey, and I will probably order enough to do a controller too. Thanks for the hard work

I once helped a friend with an article on small studio design for a music magazine. It was a long time ago, and my copy got 'borrowed' years ago. Because I had friends in the industry, I managed to get 2 serious professionals, one from Eastlake, and the other from Sandy Brown Associates, to talk to him about what you could do a on a tiny/no budget. They both said that the only effect egg boxes have is psycho-acoustic - they look a bit like studio tiles, so the room feels better. They agreed that they were not worth the trouble of fitting, and both advocated other things, old carpet or better, old style carpet underlay. Fibreglass lagging under a cloth cover is good - and if can afford some plywood, or scrounge some old panel doors, you can make acoustic screens. Years later, I made some very effective diffusers, inita=ially from old cardboard packing boxes, oped out flat and cut into wobbly strips, then improved in insulation foam, (we used a UK make called 'Jablite'), cut with a home made hot wire cutter, (do it outdoors to avoid the smelly fumes). There are a lot of old wives tales in home studio design - the first one being that you can achieve any real kind of soundproofing. It's much harder to keep noises out than you think too. A little science goes a long way, there are plenty of books and sites, just that very few people ever read them. And the real thing doesn't look as cool as egg boxes, especially if you paint them.... Some friend recorded a band on a farm in Devon, and I went along. The guy let us build a sort of room in his barn, out of bales of hay, used some old metal 'siding' for a reflector area. It sounded OK. We just had to shut down around milking time....

There is a very nice classic 'Moog Style' knob available at http://synthesizers.com/cabinets.html Not cheap at $4, but a classic design. For me, one of my x0x is going in the PT-10, looking fairly standard, unless I fall in love with Sasha's design, (which is highly likely given his track record). For the other, I fancy a larger 'retro' styled unit, black panel, 1950's knobs, and chrome bezeled LED's, thinking of old Lab gear style here. I really like my old valve tester, and would love to do something using this style.

The 1% ones on the LadyAda BOM - not the ones for the LED's, which you will need to adjust for which type of LED you have, and how bright you want them. I think everyone can get 5% basic resistors..

Quick thought - is is worth me getting the 1% resistors in bulk from my usual supplier. they work out at about £0.02 each. i.e. 1% resistor pack? Sheet will be updated soon.

First batch ordered today. I have managed to add some AN6562's to the order which means this is a full kit of the rare/obsolete parts. If you didn't get in the first batch, don't worry, I can do a second set - he has more parts. Once I have parts, I will memo/email costs and paypal detail requests.

I've put you down anyway. Please memo me your email addres and I'll try sending from this end. As I said, I won't know the actual cost until I have got the goods delivered, (duty rate etc), though I allowed for that in my quote of 20-22 euro, postage will depend on where you are, the final packed weight, and whether you want postal insurance. I may have AN6562's to add too, though I don't expect them to make a major difference

You are right. I will update the file when I get home (I'm on a friends machine here). I will assume anyone that has ordered pots on the old form wants a full set. Thanks for that, Two of us checked it and we still missed an item. I'll put the USB jack on as an option too.

Well,as they say it's your kink, but kissing transistors is usually1 safer than kissing soldering irons ........ (This is now a MIDIbox traditional joke) 1 Does not apply to switchmode chopper transistors.

Updated - All Parts Arrived It will probably come in more than one batch, due to the usual stock problems, but I can now pad out the Digikey orders to get free postage for a reasonable number of orders. Does anyone need programmed AVRs? Update Orders for: Sasha b-funk MTE kokiPsiho Goblinz asafnetzer TheProf Kartoshka Julian Voirin Status: NKK switches arrived from Farnell Mouser order #1 arrived Digikey Order #1 arrived Mouser Order #2 Arrived Digikey Order #2 Arrived Farnell Order #2 Arrived All parts now in stock bar 1% resistors, (and only 2 people wanted them). I have a lot of accounting to do to match all the currencies, but I should be invoicing and dispatching from 22 of September. OrderForm02.txt OrderForm02.txt

Thanks Goblinz a misprint! I'm just emailing about AN6562's now

Some of the positions on the board, HFE is not critical, especially those doing triggering etc. Technology transplant warned me that the Fairchild ones from Mouser can cause problems with lockups, and to go for Sanyo, as used in the original 303's. As I posted in another thread I got a good sound using BC212C and BC184C in a repair job on an original, though I am not sure if every transistor had failed, and I can't remember which ones I replaced. By the way - if you are doing critical HFE tests, (or VCE test for matching), do not handle the transistors with your fingers, you will warm them up and get varying readings. Even a draughty room can affect VCE enough to measure. I know this from selecting transistors to repair a Moog ladder filter, a long time ago. I spent all night wondering why I got variable readings. In a draught proof room, and using tweezers to handle the transistors I got much better results. Being realistic, it is not practical to get a better match than +/- 5 on gain. I must measure the gains of one of my LM394 or SSM pairs, to see how close they match.

I have a peak electronics transistor tester, and I easily knock up a fixed current Hfe test jig. It's not as bad as Wilba testing all those SIDs.

A Bit of Good News at Last, Update 3 Parts Arrived (26/03/08) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Update 3 All testing done - 3 2SC733P with gain greater than 300 packed with each kit. Invoices going out as I get your Paypal addresses status: TheProf - 2 Kits - Paid - (got) Sasha - 5 Kits - Paid - sent Goblinz - 2 Kits - Paid - sent asafnetzer - 1 Kit - (held pending other bulk order) MTE - 1 Kit - Paid - sent Kartoshka - 1 Kit - (held pending other bulk order) Ganchan - 2 Kits - Paid - sent Zoran - 2 Kits - Paid - sent nebula - 1 Kit - Paid - sent BugFight - 1 Kit - Paid - sent Narwhal - 1 Kit - Paid - sent Barry N. - 1 Kit - Paid - sent ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Update 2 Parts arrived today (26/03/08) I'll start transistor testing later. Please will everyone on the list email me their Paypal address as soon as possible. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Update 1 AN6562's sourced and added Order now sent and paid for First Batch If you missed it, don't worry, I will do a second lot once this one is done. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- One of my suppliers has made me a pretty good offer, and I know he has stock. The only way to get this, though, is to buy a large batch. I can offer 20 rare parts kits which will consist of: 2SC536 - 25 Sanyo (including 1 spare) 2SA733 - 11 Sanyo (including 1 spare) BA6110 - 1 off 2SC2291 - 1 off 2SC1583 - 3 off LA4140 - 1 off 2SK30A(O) - 1 off 2SK30A(Y) - 1 off AN6562 - 2 off All parts are new, except for the BA6110, which are pulls from assembled but unused boards - they are guaranteed. I will grade the 2SA733's and make sure everyone gets a suitable pair of higher gain ones. (I will get extra). The whole lot will cost about 21 - 24 Euro, depending upon taxes, plus payPal fees, and carriage at cost to wherever you are. Those outside EC will get them cheaper, because I will do this through my company and be able to do the official VAT paperwork, (no VAT on exports outside the EC). If the duty is less I will pass the discount on, hence my 'do not send money yet'. The report is that the Fairchild 733's from Mouser may cause lockups due to tolerance spread. These are Sanyo, as per the original. Delivery to the UK will be 7 days from order. I am not splitting the packs - if you don't want some of the bits, then swap or ebay them. If you want in, send an email, marked "x0xb0x rare parts kit" to profpep (at) hotmail (dot) com (you know the drill replace the (at) and (dot) with @ and . ). Don't forget this constitutes a contract to buy. I only have a short time window on this, so need to know by 16:00 Monday 18th March at the latest. You don't need to send money now, I'll Paypal you when things are sorted, you've got up to 30 days to hustle some cash together, if you need it. I'll add names as I get emails TheProf - 2 Kits Sasha - 5 Kits Goblinz - 2 Kits asafnetzer - 1 Kit MTE - 1 Kit Kartoshka - 1 Kit Ganchan - 2 Kits Zoran - 2 Kits nebula - 1 Kit DenDer - 1 Kit Narwhal - 1 Kit Barry N. - 1 Kit First batch all spoken for +-------------------------- | Pending for second batch +-------------------------- Mark L. - 3 Kits

The real thing to remind oneself is that good production design will try to minimise the effect of component variation. I have had 3 real 303's in to repair at different times, including the one that an irate girlfriend threw out of a window. On one of these I had to replace nearly all the IC's due to a power supply accident, (and if you look at the original diagram you'll see they had to be really trying on that one). I was very concerned to produce the 'original' sound, and yet none of my suppliers had the right transistors. This was very early internet days, with few resources and less on-line suppliers. Buying from Japan or the USA was difficult. According to my old copy of "Towers International Transistor Selector", (I still have a copy, and no, it's not for sale), an equivalent to 2SA733 was BC212L. The C variant, BC212LC, could be selected to equally high gains, (Min 350). Which is what I used, the long time owner and user thought it sounded fine. The basic vanilla 2SA733p is quoted as Hfe from 40 to 600. I vote for buying a big bag of 733's and selecting the high gain ones on test. It may be that with the advent of the tighter graded parts, that the gain spread will be less. Lets look at the numbers. If 25 of us are building x0x's, that is 250 transistors. From Mouser that is about 10 Euro, including VAT. I could buy 250 and run them through the tester one night, and sweep off the top ones into separate bags, for safety I would actually buy something like 500 and give out the rest as spares. Even if we pooled our effort like this, the bottom line is that your 10 transistors, including the selected ones, aren't going to cost you much more than 1 Euro. I tried a few op-amps for the power supply, which is said to affect the 'warble' on the tune and filter due to is higher output impedance. This was a bit more difficult. I settled on the makers own equivalent. If you grab the data sheet for Panasonic's LM358, you will see that it states (AN6562) after the part number. For true cloning, you should perhaps get the Panasonic part, but since it was made under license from National, probably using the same masks, or even the same die, I think it worth a looking at LM358. These are cheap. I used them in my Oakley 3030 and they work - though the 3030 is no way a clone. Given that the main parts are relatively cheap, it may be worth buying them to get things going, and then plugging in the 'real original' part one it's available. Even if I'd had genuine AN6562 available when I built the 3030, I'd still have done the initial tests on the LM358 - because I wouldn't want to risk blowing an expensive part at the first test stage. Think about it - I do this for a living - and I'd still test with cheap bits. My 3030 made sound on first test - but I'd still put 3 LED's in backwards. There is a saying amongst snooker and pool players that a professional chalks his cue before missing a shot, not after. We all make mistakes. The professional trick is to be aware of this, and to minimise their impact by reducing the risks. Towers quotes BC184L as a sub for 2SC536. As before the A,B and C variants denote higher gains, BC184LC being the highest. BC184 is should be noted, was the transistor of choice in Neve's discrete component op-amps in the legendary 1073/1084 channel modules. The L suffix just denotes the pinout of the transistor, by the way. BC184 has the pins going EBC, BC184L has the pins going ECB. You find both in Neve modules - they used what was available, and the layout allows the use of either, depending on the way you bend the legs. Oakley used BC549 and BC559, except in the VCO, where they used (surprise!) BC212L/BC182L. The BA6110 BA662 question is not that much of a problem to me. most people are going to be running their x0x through effects, at which point the minor differences get lost. No doubt that the original parts are best, and in some cases they are the only options, but my view is that getting a working x0x, and then tweaking it to perfection as you go, is better than an exhibition piece that is one day going to be a x0x. The music is what is important in the end, and learning to use the bassline is more important than owning it. I notice nobody has ever even suggested cloning the original power supply, which generated the 12V rail with a little three transistor boost inverter, complete with dinky little transformer. This was done so that the original could be run off batteries. There are even suggestions that some of the patterns effects are due to the way the original processor hardware/software worked. I've just spent 3 hours on-line chasing more supplier, asking for batch quotes. Will report as soon as I can.

Hmmm! He's managed to buy the knobs that the UK agent says do not exist! I think I'm going to email Re'an directly from now on.

I vote we call it 'Wilbas Constant'. He can be up there with Max Planck and Avagadro. I also suggest that it be rounded up to 1.04, that way it will help towards the cost of all the parcel tape that we forget to factor in!

I've had a similar quote for the lead time on the Grayhill switchesfrom the UK distributors today. Both Black and Red are quoted as 11 weeks to UK. My price quote was £2.46 including VAT, equal to 3.20 Euro, including VAT, (UK, 17.5%, since I have a VAT registered company, this can be removed for export to non-EC countries). This is the same price as Digikey. I got a quote for 50 switches, enough for 25 x0xboxes. I can place an order as soon as I like, without a minimum cost. I think the best idea is to get all the Grayhill switches in one batch, and then split them off. I'll do a final 'price check run' and we can see where it's best to put the order. I'm less concerned about saving a Euro on the switches, than of getting an assured supply in the best possible time. From the distributors point of view, I think a large order will get better priority, (like Sasha says). I am also thinking of holding a couple of the switches as spares in my company stock, I have the bad thought of somebody breaking one at a gig, then having to wait 10 weeks again for a spare. Like I said earlier, it will be easy enough to temporarily fit a PCB style switch - which I think is what Limor did on the breadboards, so we can at least get our boxes up and running. If we need to do this, I'll do a step by step and post some pictures. Let's face it folks, the hardest part of a x0x is getting the bits.Anyone in the UK who has trouble making their x0x work is welcome to get in touch with me, and I'll do a 'get you going' service, like Oakley & co. (I' just won't charge you more than a drink). This offer does not apply if you have tried to assemble it using a gas heated soldering iron and plumbers solder, (don't laugh - I had a guy once turn up with a fuzz box design he'd done just that way. There were only 2 strips on his veroboard still stuck to the backing!) I think a new thread is a good idea.

Just being polite - I'm sure there is more than one. A little historical story: A long time ago, when I was at school, friends of my parents lived just up the road. Their daughter used to give me a lift in to school, when I was in the sixth form. She had pale blue eyes, platinum blonde hair, a men's magazine had once offered her £200 for her pictures, (in the late 60's!), and she drove a heavily modified MG soft top. Did my image as a shy bespectacled kid no end of good. She was also one of the best electronics engineers I've ever met. She graduated in the late 60's, when she was the only woman on her course. One night in 1970 she came round for me to solder up a board for her, (I used to do little assembly jobs), and a friend was showing me a 70cm transmitter design he'd made up, that wouldn't work properly. She redesigned it on 3 sheets of A4, with a slide rule. It worked first time, and he used it for years. She went abroad to work in the 80's and we lost contact. She's probably retired by now. There was a story that when she had to go out to help fault find a microwave telecoms link in the middle east, a local sheikh asked the project manager could he buy her..... She once came by after a trip working in the USA with what I thought then was the coolest watch in the world. Apparently HP gave them to employees and favoured customers - I never saw one for sale.

Other parts I notice that some other parts may be harder to get than I thought for people 'buying local', or minimum order quantities might be too expensive. I can pad out the Mouser order, because the carriage is a flat rate. Xicor capacitors (green 'mylar' ones). values like 18nF are not stocked by everyone. I can second source Panasonic caps from Farnell, (all bar 220nF). NKK toggle switch 1% resistors - I have most of these in stock, up to about 20 kits worth, and don't mind bagging them up - it would be cheaper than Maplin, anyway. 10u Caps I got lucky recently and got 1000 Elna 10uF 50V caps for about 2.5p each. I can do some bags of these (they are good for other MIDIbox bits too).

My memory refresh cycle has finally kicked in, and I dug this screen wiper from my email archive. Warning Not safe for work! http://mirrored.flabber.nl/boob.cursor/ciagnijcycka.swf I do like the cursor follow..... (and apologies to the female contingent)

I've just been doing the same. We can take either 25LB22-H or 25LR22-H (the only difference is black or red body colour). And NO I'm not doing a colour option on the order. When I checked for another distributor I found one. Abacus in the UK. They have an office in Bolton where I live! They are checking with Grayhill now. Grayhill themselves are quoting 50 days lead time. I tried to get some from Digikey when they had apparently got 30 in stock - I think Limor beat me to the punch because I got an 'out of stock' notification. Grayhill's own search option says 'non anywhere'. There may be other options. Lorlin do one, but it won't fit the board. The mechanism of the Grayhill is very very similar to the design of the Bourns ECW series encoders, but they don't seem to do a switch model. Pity Limor didn't use a MIL spec part - there has to be a second source for a part to make the list in most cases. If anyone needs to get going fast, then a cheap test option might be a couple of those Hex PCB switches used for address setting. You'd wear them out, but they could be adapted, then replaced once the Grayhills arrive. If a lot of people wanted to do that, a small adapter PCB could be made. More soon.....

Sorry for posting that - I'd only ever had it bookmarked as 'Joe Cheep', from the original group thread. A nice inexpensive project from the parts point of view, but hell on time - I did one on perfboard. If postage wasn't so expensive I'd send it over, for a template. This was before I'd heard of Lochmaster! Best wishes

The was a book "The Dancing Wu-Li masters" which tried to blend modern physics and eastern philosophy in a very hippyesque way. I think it proved the theory that the name didn't understand physics quite well.....