so i recently noticed that if i send a really bright signal through the freqbox, like not just an unfiltered sawtooth, but a sawtooth with some sparkly, spitting resonance at the high-end, the freqbox will kill off the high end whenever you are trying to use it (e.g., it doesn’t affect the signal in bypass, but even with mix set to “0” will diminish the high-end).
here is an example (first run in bypass mode, second run with freqbox enabled, but with mix set to “0” so you can more clearly hear what is going on):
similarly, the “OSC out” of the freqbox sends its internal VCO with all of its full frequency spitting analog goodness, but the normal audio out, with mix set to “10” will send that same VCO with subdued high-end.
is this normal, or has anybody else experienced this with their freqbox?
i still get some great sounds out of it, but still, it would be nice to get the full blazing effect especially when you are using it with other analog synth gear… sigh.
this happens regardless of whether the level LED is orange or green…
strangely, my moogerfooger ring modulator does not have the same effect, and leaves the original signal nice and sparkly…
Maybe it has something to do with the effected sound is not a processed version of your input signal, but the sound of the input signal modulating an internal oscillator.
I just tested this on my freqbox and I too found the bypassed signal to be much brighter. It makes me wonder if there’s a lowpass filter in there somewhere, or if the amps in the freqbox simply don’t reproduce high frequencies. If it’s a lowpass filter, then it may be possible to mod it, either bypassing the filter or adding a bright switch which bypasses the filter. I like the idea of the switch, because sometimes taming those highs is desirable.
I tested with white noise, and the roll-off is very audible.
I can also confirm that the Low Pass filter and the MURF don’t have
the roll off with mix == 0.
This must be a design decision unique to the FreqBox.
I can only guess that they cut the highs
going in to improve the sync performance/triggering..
I can’t see any reason to cut the highs going out, unless they
exploded too many tweeters with the prototype or something
I’m gonna guess that cutting the highs reduces the ability to detect edges for syncing. Its most likely to tame some of the ear shattering squawking the 107 is capable of I can see the 107 working with a Voyager or LP, but not with guitar or bass. Not unless you are going for ambient drone pieces.
I just brought home a Freq Box and this is definitely happening to me as well. I like this box, but I do wish it didn’t roll off the high end like this. I find this thing works great with short, bright synth sounds, and I would love to just layer a little bit of the Freq Box grit under and otherwise clean and sharp leads.
You could use a mixer to mix the freq box into your clean signal, or you call moog to find out if they’ll mod it for you or if a mod is possible who else can do it for you.
That’s what I am doing right now to get around this, but I would have definitely preferred that the mix knob worked in that way - even at 0% mix, the HF is rolled off on the original signal.
Actually, I was informed that the MF-101 Low Pass Filter does roll-off the high frequencies of the input signal of both the filtered and bypassed sound. I confirmed this and made a modification to fix the roll-off. Since this topic is about the FreqBox, I posted the Low Pass Filter mod info in a new topic:
