Hi. I have a question I am almost sure most of you must have had already but I could not find a clear answer in manuals or here in the forum. If I am wrong with that sorry to ask again and maybe you can point me to the right direction.
I use the voyager with some effect gear, and I really like to plug e.g. a ring mod into the ‘insert loop’ between mixer & filter. Now e.g. the vermona ring modulator can be VERY hot/loud and even has a drive knob that could be cranked up on top of that. Surely it can be much louder if I compare the volume with/without it. Currently I do this comparison to more or less match the level of the ‘untreated’ oscillators. But it would of course be nice to push the volume that goes into the filters a bit higher (since a ringmod was born to made it nastier, isn’t it?) and even into slight distortion.
But the voyager will not tell me if I overload it since the mixer overload stage (red leds) is BEFORE the insert loop, right? Does that mean that the filters are pretty unaffected by high volume or do I need to be careful? Certainly I do not want to ruin the synth with my experiments…
Many thanks for any hint in this regard.
Ah yes, and before you ask: surely I have some moogerfoogers, and I love them, but the ring mod had to be German )
If you take a close look at the audio signal path in the Voyager you will see that that all external audio is before the mixer and the mixer is before the filters. The red LED signifies mixer overload, but if you insert the Vermona ring modulator you can’t tell (visually that is) whether you have overload since the insert point is after the mixer and before the filter.
So:
with external audio the signal is before the mixer and you can use the LED as a visual indication
with the mix-out loop (ring mods, phasers, blah blah) the signal is presented after the mixer and you probably need to go by ear.
I would suggest to either keep the oscillators’ volume low (to compensate a bit) or maybe limit the ring mod externally, before the signal goes into the Voyager.
Hi Yannis. Thanks a lot for your answer. That is how I thought it is. So I dropped a line to moog technical folks and they replied promptly, too, and here is what they said:
The Voyager’s effects insert is very robust, yes. It should be able to
handle anything in a reasonable audio range.
Grand! I will keep using that insert loop with a much better conscience from now on.
It is really great how responsive ‘everything moog’ seems to be I am very grateful for this. Hopefully I will be able to give something back somehow in the forum.
)