i just got a some new cp251s, and one of them is newer stock than all my others. there aren’t too many important differences, except for one:
there is no longer a power input on the back of the unit, just on the side. this is a major inconvenience for me as i have several of these, and i like to have them all flush against eachother and powered from behind.
if anyone here is considering getting one of these, you may want to ask the vendor to open the box and see if it is a new one. you can tell because the old ones have the red nuts around the pedal input jacks, while the new ones have a printed white circles around the pedal jacks instead.
i hope very much that in moog’s next production run of cp251s they bring back the rear power input. i don’t really understand why they removed it. the metal plate on the back still has a plugged-up hole where it should be, and i can’t imagine that they would have changed the pcb.
That would mess me up too. You can always find great deals on CP-251’s on Ebay that will have the power supply in the original spot. Thankfully I got my 2nd one on Ebay and didn’t run into that.
yes, because you have to reconfigure the power supply cabling anyway to rack them to the frame. It’s kind of a pain.. i hope they’ve made the cable a little longer on the new ones; it’s hellishly difficult to rack 2 CP-251s into the 3-space rack, as it’s really easily to have one of the power connectors unplug by simply bending the rack frame a little bit. then you have to go back, unscrew everything, and fiddle with it more. i think i spent a good half-hour getting them racked properly.
incidentally it is well worth the effort; the cp units and a couple choice foogers more or less really do equal a powerful modular unit. especially once the mf-107s come out.
I have a new CP too. On mine there is the power plug on the side like yours, but on the back of the unit there is a black round-shaped flat plastic plug which covers the hole for the ACplug on the back of the unit.
that’s what i find so baffling about this. they couldn’t have saved more than 50 cents per unit by removing the rear power plug. i would have been willing to pay at least an extra $20 per unit to have them keep this feature. it’s still possible to take the power plug out of the side and move it to the back, so i’m glad they at least left the hole in the back, but it is quite a bit less convenient than it was before when there were two power inputs.
if they needed to save money on these, i would have preferred losing the wood sides or something else purely cosmetic.
anyway, now i have eight cp251s. of the four new ones i got recently, one is the old kind with the red jacks and two power inputs, and the other three are new ones. i kind of wish all eight of them matched, but i guess it’s my own fault for not ordering them years ago.
but i’m done complaining about this. i hope they change it back to they way it was when they are ready to build more cp251s. they are still worth the money as they are and i wouldn’t want to discourage anyone from ordering one or several.
no, it’s in the same place as the old one, on the “top” (not the top where the knobs are, but the other top. that didn’t really clear anything up at all…)
i have four other moogerfoogers, (101, 102, 103, 104z), so having eight unrelated random outputs is handy for all the different cv inputs on these. it’s also useful to have them all modulating eachother to create several wildly fluctuating control signals. i have some recordings on my web-site from when i only had four cp251s ( http://www.morelater.com/music ), and i’ll try to post some new recordings of what is possible with eight.
one thing i neglected to mention earlier is that the attenuators on the new cp251s can invert the signal. so this is actually an improvement over the old cp251. the old ones go from 0 to 1, while the new ones go from -1 to 1. the knobs on the new ones feel a lot smoother when you turn them as well.
i opened an old one and a new one up, and they look quite a bit different inside. in the new ones, there are two pcbs, and the jacks are all mounted directly to the pcb. on the old one, there is one pcb with wires all running to the jacks. there are also a lot of discrete components soldered on to the old pcb. the new pcbs are turned the other way so you can’t see what is soldered onto them by taking off the back panel.
The reversing attenuators is a big plus for me, and I plan to buy two CP-251’s very soon.
Does anyone know the serial numbers they start at or a way to tell which version you are getting by the box cause I will have to order these online, and don’t want to get someone’s older stock??
the highest numbered old-style cp251 i have is 1224, and the lowest numbered new one is 1282. the easiest way to find out is to ask the vendor to open the box. if it has red jacks, it’s an old one. if they are all black, it’s a new one. also, the attenuators on the old ones are labeled “0 - 10” and on the new ones “-5 - +5”. i’m pretty sure analogue haven is all out of the old ones now since that’s where i got mine.
but the best option is to ask the vendor to check. any vendor who won’t check this for you is someone you don’t want to buy from anyway.
