From Oakley Sound via analogue Sent Tue, Jan 8th 2019, 10:12
From Oakley Sound via analogue Sent Tue, Jan 8th 2019, 10:12
I think the key difference in sound between the various chips is not the actual chips as Florian says but the maximum clock speeds attained by each family. The SAD chips can be clocked stupidly fast - which means they can do the huge flanged sweeps that the BF-1, Electric Mistress, etc are famous for. Getting a MN3207 to sweep that wide is not a trivial task although they can almost get there. Tom's wonderful sample shows the sort of thing: http://www.babic.com/SYN/effects/SOLINA-MXR126-pos-neg.mp3 The early badly behaved short TCA350Y BBDs are particularly noisy so the surrounding circuitry takes that into account and reduces the available bandwidth (at both low and high frequencies) accordingly. This gives those early ensembles a certain sound for sure. For example: www.oakleysound.com/Lowrey vs SRE330.mp3 This uses a Roland Alpha Juno to create a raw sawtooth pad which is then sent to both an Oakley Sound SRE330 and a Lowrey Symphonic Ensemble unit from 1975. The Lowrey ensemble is basically their version of the triple ensemble circuitry from the Solina string machine complete with TCA350Y BBDs. You hear the same sound firstly played through the Lowrey and then the SRE330 in Triple Ensemble Mode. I crossfade between the two effects after each sound to show how similar they sound. However, they are not identical. The Lowrey is noisier with considerable modulation oscillator breakthrough and there is some of sort of peak in the frequency response which isn't there in the more mellow SRE330. The latter perhaps could be added with EQ should one wish to replicate that part of the sound. Tony