We’ve been using the Moog Subsequent 37 for a video game project and absolutely love it. One of the best things about this synth besides that raw, vintage tone is how easy it is to share patches across studios. I bought mine about 9 months ago. It sounds gritty, powerful and full of character/life. Almost like a 60 year old machine that has been played every day of its life.
To streamline our workflow, the other composer picked up a Subsequent 37 as well so we could both work from our own studios. But when I finally visited and we A/B’d the two units we were both shocked at how different they sound.
My unit sounds alive and raw, his, on the other hand sounds much cleaner, almost too perfect like a software emulation of mine. On top of that, my unit is outputting about 6dB more level than his, using the exact same patches and gain structure.
We even loaded up the stock Moog factory presets for comparison and they still don’t sound the same across both units.
Our next step is to pick up a demo unit from a store here in Stockholm to A/B against both of ours. That should help us figure out if this is just natural unit-to-unit variation, or if something’s off with one of them.. Possibly a calibration or hardware revision issue.
Has anyone else experienced this? Could this be a calibration issue? Or is it possible that Moog made subtle hardware changes between manufacturing runs?
Any insight would be super helpful. We’d love to get these units sounding more consistent.
About the output level discrepancy, I don’t know anything. But about the rawness/cleanness, I think a difference in calibration could be the cause of your observations.
@Andreas
This is interesting. When I was doing research on the Subsequent 37 before purchasing one, I read a number of YouTube comments that mentioned what you’re talking about: some people thought it sounded too clean, others thought it sounded really raw and/or gritty. Were you able to do a comparison with a third unit? I’d be interested in hearing the results.
@stiiiiiiive
RE: calibration - is there a setting that can be adjusted, and if so, how does one access it? Is there an internal trim pot?
We managed to compare all three units and wish I’d gotten back to this post sooner to update you. The test gave some very clear result, the differences between the three Subsequent 37s were quite significant. I must have gotten really lucky with mine, as it still sounded the best in our opinion. The third synth landed somewhere in between the two, so it was at least a bit closer.
At this point, we’d never want to recalibrate my unit since it basically became the “mother” of our soundtrack and we may need to return to those exact sounds for future updates. But I will read up on how to calibrate the synth and maybe one day try making the other one sounding like mine. I honestly never expected the variation to be this big. After doing the comparison I can’t help but wonder how different our impression of the instrument might have been if we’ started out with one of the other units. Definitely a lucky draw!!
@T-S I hope yours has that beautiful grit as well. I can’t express how pleased with mine as it captures our favorit sound of all time. Even after watching several YouTube videos and listening to sound examples we still find mine has a rawer and more authentic and vintage tone than most videos and wavs. I will make a proper comparison for you some day. At the moment I only have access to mine here at home.
@KG666 Mine turned out to be the standout unit, with a raw and characterful tone that really set it apart from the others. Still I can’t help but wonder… what if there’s an even better-sounding Subsequent 37 out there?
At the end it is a lack of ability to control the production process of an analog instrument.
The sound of an analog synthesizer is determined by the sum of the functional specs and the component tolerances, formally spoken. My favorite example is the waveshaper of my 901 VCO. Due to an non perfect circuit design the waveforms are not mathematically perfect, but this imperfection adds a nice little buzz to the output which I like very much, so this is the best sounding VCO I have.
Next is, that electronic components, in special analog ones, become older and older, change their values, behavior etc.
Modern production processes try to narrow tolerances and try to ensure a repeatable result, but whether this is considered as clean and perfect or boring is a matter of taste.
As you said, in analogue realm, having slight discrepancies is expected. I agree that I cannot define “slight” here
But in the end of the day, the differences pointed out by @andreas are nothing but subjective (except for the measurable 6dB output difference):
I suggested the calibration as a culprit because it impact oscillators tuning and this particular point might be the source of rawness vs clean-ness in the sound. But are we talking about slightly out of tune oscillators or anything else here?
About gain, as anything can be gain related (final volume, level of the input in the filter… but also filter envelope amount for example…), if the factory calibration of the gain related components is not constant alongthe production, then yes, changes in the sound can happen. I would expect this not to occur with a solid process control, indeed.
About presets: after a calibration of my good ol’ LP, the presets do not sound like before anymore and it’s normal: the synth stores parameter values, not sound per se. The same parameter values with just calibrated oscillators underneath can lead to different sounds. Obviously, the more recent the preset creation, the more blatant the discrepancy.
