Brand new simple analog synth, from Italy

lucarossini

Hello,
I'm an engineering graduating guy from Italy, passionate in analog electronics.
My thesis is about a simple, basic and mono analog synth. The project is going on on a board (discrete components), but after finished we will have the possibility to integrate it all up in a chip.

My question to the synth community is: do you think that the market would be interested in such a simple, but very cheap, COMPLETELY analog synth?

Are there some, and how many, musicians that aren't interested in a very technical , maybe modular synth, and would prefer a quite easy,cheap, yet greatly sounding synth, accurately designed at universities' stadards?

thanks for you advice!

Luca,
Politecnico di Milano, Italy, and, jointly, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, UK.

p.s. some details: we're planning to have midi entrance for professional playing, together with a simple keyboard, patch storage i don't know, everything highly portable, and with a relative low cost, let's' say 80 €. In fact, designing costs will be priced as zero, as it is my thesis, and markup will be reduced to essential.

elektro80 · Posted: Tue Oct 17, 2006 8:34 am Post subject:

This sounds great!

A chip? YES YES YES YES!!!!

Keep in mind that a "properly" designed analog synth will in nature be modular even if it is on a chip. You must have access to control voltages for the filter parameters, envelopes and more.

opg · Posted: Tue Oct 17, 2006 10:26 am Post subject:

Yes, this would be most awesome, indeed. If you were to include MIDI, though, I would forget about adding a keyboard so you can keep the price down. Let the consumers get their own MIDI controller keyboard.

Cool

seraph · Posted: Tue Oct 17, 2006 12:24 pm Post subject:

ciao Luca
benvento a electro-music.com Very Happy

opg · Posted: Wed Oct 18, 2006 12:16 pm Post subject:

This has really gotten me thinking. Who actually does sell analog ICs for synths these days, since SSM and CEM are no more, for example? A while back, I did some simple searches on Mouser, Digikey, Maxim-IC, etc., and everything was MHz VCOs. Does this mean that if we had the old analog ICs still available in limitless supply, synths like the SoundLab MiniSynth could be a lot smaller, with fewer parts? Shocked

softfreak

opg · Posted: Mon Oct 23, 2006 6:20 am Post subject:

I had a conversation with an engineering friend of mine. Your idea of having a chip made really got me thinking. I tried to look into how I could get an analog DIP chip made, and my friend told me that it would be very expensive, being that the company would make you order a huge quantity of chips (a few thousand dollars) for them to do it.

I also asked him about the legalities of submitting an exact duplicate of the Curtis VCO chip (CEM 3340), since they are no longer made but the schematics are easily obtainable. He thought there would be trouble unless you only had a small quantity made - which is apparently not possible?

Confused

elektro80 · Posted: Mon Oct 23, 2006 6:30 am Post subject:

..but.. there is also a huge market here? Isn´t there? If the chip is designed in order to both work as a semi hardwired ARP Odysset style monophonic, but also allows a sensible modular layout, then this would be really hot product? One thing is designing and selling a full synth with wooden sides, but selling the chip itself could be profitable too?

elektro80

opg

mosc · Posted: Mon Oct 23, 2006 11:10 am Post subject:

I used to be in the IC business. My guess is this would not make money. If it would, then the people that already developed the chips would still be making them. ICs are about economy of scale. Small runners are unprofitable. This is because there are many costs that are fixed - such as making the masks - that must come up front. But as students, you should investigate this yourselves, come up with a business case, and see if you can get someone to fund the IC project. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that designing and making a chip is all that it takes, you must develop some sort of test program. There are analogue IC test sets, but programming them is a very specialized skill set. Also, consider that almost all ICs go through several iterations - especially analogue chips.

When you make a DIY synth the most expensive and time consuming part is the case, panel, knobs, switches, jacks, power supply, and wiring it all together.

ian-s · Posted: Mon Oct 23, 2006 12:35 pm Post subject:

I remember buying a bunch of CEM chips in the early 80's.
I got as far as breadbording one of the VCO chips. The DIY project never got off the ground because of the disappointingly huge number of additional components required. I ended up selling the lot as spares to a Memorymoog owner.

v-un-v · Posted: Mon Oct 23, 2006 12:56 pm Post subject:

opg · Posted: Mon Oct 23, 2006 1:43 pm Post subject:

v-un-v · Posted: Mon Oct 23, 2006 2:13 pm Post subject:

mosc · Posted: Tue Oct 24, 2006 11:10 am Post subject:

jksuperstar · Posted: Tue Oct 24, 2006 8:09 pm Post subject:

Maybe one could buy second hand equipment and create a DIY ala-MAKE magazine FAB-IN-YOUR-BASEMENT project?

hehehe

I'm in the chip business too. THousands of dollars is cutting it WAY short. I was designing products that sold 100,00o per year, and it was VERY difficult get a vendor to do a chip. It just costs lots of money.

Besides, our italian friend will make his chips through the open consortium, and maybe get 10 made. Total. Ever. I had this opportunity while I was in college as well.

lucarossini · Posted: Thu Oct 26, 2006 10:12 am Post subject: replying to you all

Hello everybody,
really thanks a lot for your answers!
About the questions on chip fabrication costs: my unievrsity mentor told me that they can submit new chip designs to infineon company and get them made for around 600 euros. If you want 1 or 50 it doesn't matter, the cost is the mask and the process. then it is batch fabrication.

But...he didn't tell me what about if my project is hopefully selling really goog and i want some more... I actually think that it wouldn't be such a problem since the mask is already there, but one of you told me it isn't like that.
We'll see...

By the way, sorry for being not so present in the forum, but for me it is an extremely busy period, so i can just have a fast look at it, not so often. Hopefully it will end next week!

Another thing to sorry about is the fact that i'm not an experienced player/buyer of synth so i can't follow you when you talk to me about soundlab or AMS... i have to make myself a culture of it, but my point of view will always be the one of the guy who just builds it to the listening purpose.

Ok, hear from you later on, thanks again!

Luca

deknow · Posted: Thu Oct 26, 2006 10:39 am Post subject:

well...if the obsticals can be overcome, perhaps there is a larger market for such a chip....a usb analog synth? a pci card with a dozen analog synths? yes, pots, wires, and cases are expensive, but what if it were along the nord modular line of thinking? all pots and wires can be "virtual", and you only need to use the cpu to run it, not to calculate the waveform....if it had a 24/96 bus to the computer, it could be really sick.

deknow

jksuperstar · Posted: Fri Oct 27, 2006 10:11 pm Post subject:

Sorry if I came across negative earlier.

What process will you be using? CMOS, BiCMOS, BiPolar? Wondering what limits you're process has on the ideas you (and the others here Smile

) would like to implement. I'd recommmend doing something odd, somewhat modular (ie- break Ins & outs of functions to pins, so they can be rewired or midified), and even feature rich. There are a million simple projects out there for the standard subtractive synth, so I'd be interested in something strange, the way the SID chip was to the C64.

Some quirky things to include (besides you're basic oscillators, filters, orenvelopes) would be a PLL (good for freq. multiplication and harmonic generation), multipliers (envelopes and modulators), or adders (mixers), noise generator (diode based?), and a good sample & hold latch.

Maybe you could use software (such as Clavia's free G2 modular simulator) to emulate an idea, and refine it before trying things on your board.

Just remember, all complex things are made of lots of simple things. It's the basic premise of engineering Smile

lucarossini · Posted: Mon Oct 30, 2006 12:54 pm Post subject: hi again

Hi there,
thanks again for answering. Actually, about the IC technology we're going to use, it's a question mark, because first we want to get the whole thing designed on a discrete basis. So the integration process would be a second goal.
About the odd synthesis or things to place into you are talking about, that's very interesting for me because I would like to know what you want to be in a simple mono analog synth.

Particularly, i'm getting information about the different types of synthesis, because the previously chosen subtractive one could really be boring to you. About Fm synthesis, I don't know if we can design excellent brand new analog multipliers to drive the oscillators, but at the same time, as a design guideline, we would like to reduce at the minimum the parts to buy and use as black boxes.

Ok folks, thank you again, hear from you later on!

Luca