The state of the art - electronic music synthesizers
There has been a wonderful resurgence of analog music synthesizers in the last 20 years. All of the old circuit design patents are now public domain meanwhile, the quality and stability of the components has continuously improved.
You can get the gorgeous sound of a Moog synthesizer but without the tuning issues -- the pitch will not drift when the air conditioner comes on.
Forbes has a
nice general write-up:
Small Firms Are Making Big Bucks In The Analog Economy
Imagine if Tim Cook fired up the production lines and started churning out the Apple II instead of the latest Macbook Pro. The world would think he had gone barking mad. After all, what company in its right mind would decide to start rebuilding technology last manufactured in the 1970s?
But in 2013, that was exactly the business decision made by the bosses at Korg, a Japanese multinational corporation that is one of the world�s biggest musical instrument manufacturers. Rather than spend their R&D cash on developing a digital instrument of the future, they decided to start once again building an analog synthesizer called the MS-20, which was considered cutting edge when it was released in 1978 before being dismissed as worthless trash less than a decade later. Their gamble clearly worked, because the instrument sold out across the world. Now its competitors are widely tipped to be considering making the same move, with synth fans hoping that other Japanese giants like Yamaha and Roland will bring much-loved designs back from the pre-digital past.
It is a fun time to be alive. The other area that was not mentioned is that with the advent of very high-speed and very cheap
Digital signal processing chips, it is possible to model the characteristics of a specific circuit -- say a Moog low-pass ladder filter and recreate the sound with the push of a few buttons. The wonderful thing here is that you can change that filter to an A.R.P. bandpass filter with the push of a few buttons.
Comparing the two side by side, there is a noticeable difference but when the audio is blended into the mix and when it has any post-processing effects added, these differences disappear.
Posted by DaveH at January 14, 2014 10:58 PM