| Since I wrote the following, I have mail from a fellow at IRCAM in Paris, who
grew up in the same town in Italy as the Orla factory.....
Hmmm, my ears can be fooled in a music store with would-be guitar heros
flailing away. There are some super presets (and the usual duds), but.....
It's a four-op sine wave FM unit. I can't tell whether it is a Yamaha chipset
or a clone. The labels are scratched off the chips! Mike Metlay might know
if the Elka FM machines were clean-room clones, or did they use Yamaha chips?
The audio path has some TL84's in it, which probably reduces distortion
products. Older 741 technology chips have slew-rate problems, especially for
large signals. There are some 4136 quad-741 chips in the chorus section,
showing that they know that they are good enough for LFO work. It's not as
bright as the Simmons SDE (whose Yamha chips closely resemble the scratched-off
ones in the Orla), but it is warmer. This is pretty subjective. I need a
realtime analyzer. Then I'm going to go into 'golden ears' type subjective
synth reviewing :-)
I expected to find 'edible' (old DEC term for ratty phenolic) PC boards,
probably with a daughter-board per voice. No dice. Nice clean two-sided
glass-epoxy. Minor surprize, there's some German on the board. Anyone know
what Erweiterung (perhaps "optional"?) and Gleichricter mean? Perhaps
Elka/Orla did some (or got some) of their engineering done in Germany.
It has a big, unusually warm, sound for an FM machine. There is a massive
chorusing section that is selectable on a per-patch basis, but it sounds warm
without it. I wonder if it is always engaged in some low level sense, even if
it is switched-out? That massive chorsusing is wild, shades of every bad
soundtrack that you ever heard made with analog organ-style string machines.
The Elka ones, where the cosmic chorusing almost made up for the fact that the
source waveforms (pulse, probably) were nothing like a string spectrum. Beyond
the fact that it has that chorusing, it uses two complete voices for each note
(48 total voices, though you can't get independent access) with selectable
detune fine enough for flanging.
Major amazement:
MIDI implementation. Super win. 24-voice polyphony. 16 simultaneous patches
(limited by MIDI channels, no splitting or layering offered). If a channel is
enabled (by setting it to a non-zero patch number) it tracks program changes on
that channel. Dynamic allocation. Continues to play held notes through a
program change. (Hi, Nick.) I like this implementation. I don't like
threading through nasty user interfaces just to convince some box that I don't
care what it thinks the zones are. Oh, yes, the chorusing is per-voice, not
global.
Most serious loss:
Two, count 'em, 2 outputs. For the stereo chorus, of course.
Where it came from:
Tim tells me that the guy trading it in plays MIDI accordian. The box shows
that it was mail-ordered from Syn-Cordian Musical Instrument Corp., Englewood,
New Jersey. My guess is that he special-ordered it after seeing it in an Elka
accessories catalog for his MIDI accordian. You know, the accessories that the
importer really doesn't want you to order.... Tim said that it supposedly cost
a fortune. From the construction, that's believable. We're not talking
Japanese mass-production here.
Eirikur (I need another rack. Mounting this will displace something.)
|
| > Please spell Gleichricter again -- it doesn't look familiar
I think it was actuaaly Gleichrichter, and it is probably a technical term
concerning filtration. I'm not too surprized about the other word, it was the
label for a box around half the voice chips, clearly the difference between the
12 and 24-voice models (mentioned in the manual).
Eirikur
|
| >> Please spell Gleichricter again -- it doesn't look familiar
>I think it was actuaaly Gleichrichter, and it is probably a technical term
>concerning filtration. I'm not too surprized about the other word, it was the
>label for a box around half the voice chips, clearly the difference between the
>12 and 24-voice models (mentioned in the manual).
> Eirikur
gleich = same or equal
richter = someone or something that arranges or makes something be
a certain way I think -- this is the gut feel -- I kind of
know it but have trouble putting my finger on it if you
know what I mean. A "Richter" is also a judge.
Richtung = direction
richten = to set right, arrange, adjust (among other things
------- 2 minutes later -----------------------
I thought all of my German dictionaries were packed away but I just
spotted on and got it.
Gleichrichter = rectifier
and is an electronics term
----------------------
Chad
|