How easy is it to damage the voyager via CV input mistakes?
In my synth past I have only tried simple pitch and gate control.
My assumption is that detriment is not too common but it is possible. Are red ports inputs only and blues output only?
From the Old School’s outs called Cv and Gate (not on regular voyager btw), I went in to the red pitch port and in to the blue env/gate. I realized this might not be right as I didn’t get results I expected after a couple f key presses. Can a brief, simple mistake like that can cause lasting problems?
It’s actually causing me to be too paranoid to want to experiment. Even with the vx-351. The manual mentions that bit about using the MULT properly, but not much more about serious taboos.
I hope this topic can be a list of known Do’s and Dont’s with moog CV usage.
Ins go to Outs. No more than 5V should be applied to a single jack at any time. Outputs SHOULD NOT have voltage going into them, lest bad things happen. Running voltage through a multiple is not good, as it becomes easy to go over the 5V limit. Only DC power should be going to inputs, and only DC should be leaving outputs. Other than that, it’s all good.
Running more than one five volt signal into a multiple will give you more than five volts. Using CV gear like Future Retro’s stuff will give you more than five volts, as they use a ten or fifteen volt standard, I can’t remember which offhand, but it’s more than five volts, so DON’T DO IT! ALWAYS check the voltage output of any non-Moog gear before using it in your setup.
The modulars back in the day had protective circuitry to keep stuff from blowing up. I assume this circuitry is still incorporated in the design of modern Moog synths, but I like to err on the side of caution. Best case scenario, you might blow a fuse somewhere, or the synth will stop making noise until the offending connection is removed. I would just avoid putting an out to an out.
Huh? A multiple splits one voltage source into many (think the opposite of a mixer). So you can for example run one LFO to 3 different destinations. Unless you use a buffered multiple (which 99% of them are not) you can actually lose a bit of voltage by running a signal through a mult.
On the other hand using a multiple as a poor man’s mixer (multiple outputs connected to one input) will cause issues and is a bad thing to do.
It makes sense if you think about it. If one jack has 5 volts going to a jack producing 5 volts, that means you have 10 volts where 5 volts should exist. Of course, this is just 100% speculation on my part.
It depends on the circuitry and possibly is not the same for every CV output. Generally, a CV output can tolerate shorting to earth because it happens briefly when you plug in and of course can happen accidently.
Also, I don’t think two 5v outputs in a multi make 10v. Depends on the circuit, the lower voltage might in fact pull the higher voltage down.
Let’s hope that Moog have very safe CV inputs and output which can tolerate unexpected things.
