dieter says:
"For the A-107 we have a new problem. Most of the
electronic parts for A-107 were sent on August 26,
2003 to our manufacturer. But so far the parts did not
arrive. We applied for an investigation last week but
no results so far. If the consignment will not be
discovered the next few days we will have to order the
parts again from our suppliers. The consignment was
insured and so we will get the money back. Most of the
parts are standard (e.g. resistors, capacitors,
diodes) but some of the parts are manufactured
especially for us (e.g. front panel, potentiometers,
LED cover) or have a long delivery time (e.g. the quad
VCA used in the A-107). So I hope the consignment will
come up soon.
The last few days we finished the development of these
new modules: A-172 Max/Min, A-133 VC Polarizer and
A-167 Comparator. We already ordered the front panels,
pc boards and electronic parts for these modules. I
hope they will be available end of September or early
October. The development of A-149-1 SOU1, A-137 Wave
Multiplier and A-196 PLL is nearly finished too. All
modules work well but we still have to do some "fine
tuning": e.g. sensibility and range of the controls
and CV inputs of the A-137, VCO ranges and filter
control in the A-196, voltage range and quantization
of A-149-1 outputs. In the first A-149-1 design we
thought that it would be a good idea to quantize all
outputs to semitone steps. But after testing the
prototype we tend to keep this feature only for the
first two QRV outputs (2n states and n+1 states) as
one obtains here max. 64 states (n=6) and we think it
is a good idea to quantize these outputs to 1/12V (=
semitone quantizing). But for the SRV outputs we now
believe that the semitone quantization is not such a
good idea as it would limit the number of possible
states. If quantizing is desired even for the SRV
outputs one could use a A-156 quantizer module. In the
original Buchla module the QRV outputs were quantized
too (due to the circuit that adds 5 bits of a shift
register that works as a digital noise/random circuit
with different weight) - but not exactly to semitones
but an arbitrary grid. We think that it is good idea
to adjust the QRV outputs so that they correspond to
semitones when used in combination with a VCO. Even
the two SRV outputs of the Buchla module are some kind
of quantized but with 256 arbitrary grid steps due to
the 8 shift register bits that are added with
different weight.
I suppose that the development of A-142-1, A-137 and
A-196 will be finished within the next few days (or
1-2 weeks) so that the modules could be available in
October/November.
In the meantime we also found a manufacturer that
produces capsulated vactrols (i.e. LED/LDR
combinations). So I assume that the next new
developments may be vactrol modules if the new
vactrols are OK (we are waiting for samples). Maybe I
could revive a vactrol filter I have designed in the
seventies: a vactrol version of the Parker/Steiner
filter that was published in the magazine "Electronic
Design" in December 1974.
Best regards
Dieter Doepfer
