Hey guys,
So I bought my Mother to eventually build a Eurorack system, but now I have some extra modules, I get all kinds of weird issues. I tried to research this and found out that there is an impedance mismatch between Mother-32 and other Eurorack modules.
I can not use the KB out to track other oscillators. Altough the mult is buffered, it has the same impedance problem as the KB out, so I cannot use it to route audio or tracking signals to or from other modules. I can not even use the square wave out to hard sync my 2HP Osc.
There is a sollution: get a real buffered mult, so the mismatched outs are not directly wired to other modules’ inputs. For me that is just not an acceptable sollution. I bought this Mother for a specific purpose: to function as a unit in a bigger Eurorack system, just as Moog promised. Well, it doesn’t.
It doesn’t matter if I have to send it back or whatever. I want the unit to be fixed, not some lame workaround to something that was promised and should work in the first place. Others have solved this impedance problem, why can’t Moog?
So I’ve done some further research. I have the Mother-32 and two 2HP Osc. Via Reaktor and my ES-8 I have tuned them all to the same frequency.
I was testing the hard sync capability of the Osc, with one Osc acting as slave and either Reaktor, the other Osc or the Mother-32 as master using their square waves.
Using the Reaktor → Osc combination, it works perfectly, the hard sync characteristics you would expect.
Using the Osc → Osc combination, it works perfectly, the hard sync characteristics you would expect.
Using Mother-32 → Osc, it does all kinds of weird shit, definately not anything to do with hard sync. More like adding strange random harmonics and also the tuning follows the slaves tuning, while with hard sync the timbre should change, not the tuning.
Now for the interesting part. If I use the Reaktor → Osc or Osc → Osc combination, but route the master through the Mix, Mult or Ext. Audio of the Mother-32, it does the same weird shit as described using the Mother-32 → Osc.
So my conclusion is that not only the KB out of the Mother-32 has issues, all the outputs have issues when routing to other Eurorack modules. Could somebody please help me with this?
How do you patch the hard sync?
Well, according to the 2HP Osc manual, the master signal to the sync input of the slave should be a hard edge signal, like a square, pulse or sawtooth wave. So that’s what I do, in all the cases I connected a square master signal to the sync input of the slave.
Hi MrBoogie,
I setup an account here so I could reply to this post. I just bought a Mother-32 last night and the first thing I did was plug the KB output into my MFB triple oscillator and send the audio back into the Mother-32 and it tracked perfectly over eight octaves.
Peace /
chisel316
It really depends on the ratio between output and input impedance of the modules. The Mother-32 follows the vintage standard of a 1k ohm resistor on its outputs, where other modern modules use much less.
Glad it works out well for your module, probably because your OSC input has a mich higher impedance than the output of the Mother-32, but keep in mind that this is not the case with all modules.
It is further explained here: https://learningmodular.com/when-do-you-actually-need-a-buffered-multiple/