How long does it take your Slim Phatty to warm up?

[Gil]

Hi all,

I had a Little Phatty Stage II which would warm up in 5 minutes and then stay rock solid in terms of tuning.

I have a Slim Phatty now, and unfortunately it takes way, way longer for it to get stable (in a warm room with stable temperature).
After 1.5 to 2 hours, the tuning reaches the stability that my LP did after 5-10 minutes. Until then, it is constantly drifting sharper and sharper.

Now, I emailed Moog support about it, and this is the reply I got:

"Hi Gil,

The Slim is our most thermally sensitive product. With the compact size of the chassis and the proximity of the power supply to the oscillator circuits, it takes a long time for the Slim to achieve total thermal equilibrium. Our studies here at the factory show that it can take up to an hour or two for the Slim to reach a stable temperature. I strongly recommend that you wait about this amount of time to run all calibrations. Try to do it in the middle of the day when the temperature surrounding the Slim is at its most consistent. Also, if at all possible, try to leave the unit on for at least an hour before playing a show or recording.

The Autotune feature of the Slim will not adjust the Slim's oscillators to one another. Instead, it tries to bring the overall tuning of the Slim in tune with an A 440Hz reference value that is stored within the firmware. This feature works best after the Slim is completely warmed up. I recommend the 'ON' feature in the Fine Tune menu for use during the warm-up period. All of this is normal behavior for the Slim Phatty. I hope this helps!

Cheers,
Perry"

Fair enough, I accepted the answer and thanked him for the swift reply.
However, I keep reading posts of people who own SP's and say their's are perfectly stable.
Amos himself stated in one thread that at NAMM they had 4 SP's stacked and they all stayed perfectly stable after 10 minutes.

This makes me feel a little "cheated" I suppose, why are some people's SP's super stable and mine drifts for the first 2 hours it is on?
(Before anyone tells me to do a calibration, I've done the procedure, twice, after the SP was on 4 hours straight).
This is especially annoying since I bought this synth to take live.
Autotune doesn't work while you're playing, so unless you stop for a minute, it won't stop the Phatty from further drifting.

I'd like to know how long it takes other's SPs to get in tune, and if all this sounds normal to all SP users?

Thanks
Gil

[theglyph]

Our studies here at the factory show that it can take up to an hour or two for the Slim to reach a stable temperature. I strongly recommend that you wait about this amount of time to run all calibrations. Try to do it in the middle of the day when the temperature surrounding the Slim is at its most consistent. Also, if at all possible, try to leave the unit on for at least an hour before playing a show or recording.

I hate to say it but this is either a design failure or a bad statement from Moog tech support. It simply doesn't make any sense. The LP and Voyager take roughly 20 minutes to get to a reasonably stable temperature.

[Gil]

Thanks for the reply.

I'm hoping for some replies from other Slim Phatty (not Little Phatty) users on this forum who can help me determine if all Slims act this way or if I should be demanding a replacement unit.

Unfortunately as of now it's a pain to use live, since I have to keep fiddling with the "fine tune" while playing instead of focusing on my actual playing.

Thanks!

[spin]

Hi!

i have both little phatty and slim phatty, i can say you that my little phatty is faster then sp to reach tuning stability while sp is faster then lp to reach osc2 freq stability....my lp takes much more time to get osc2 freq in tune with osc1 respect of sp. I don't know why but this is the truth