Vintage Analog Moog vs. New Analog Moog

[~Sinedrifter~]

Hi everyone!

I was reading another thread on the build quality of new electronics (it was the thread about Moog engineering, I think.) In that discussion, someone said they prefer buying vintage Moog over new Moog because the older stuff is easier to service in the long run... something about SMT stuff being harder to replace or something.

A lot of you seem to own vintage and new Moog, and I wonder how you all feel about the longevity of vintage vs. new Moog. My question comes from thinking not about build/engineering quality, but about how serviceable an analog synth will be in the long run considering the different types of circuit boards (and all of those electronic components' in there whose names I do not know) used in the older and newer stuff.

Exclusively in terms of serviceability, which is best then, and why, based on your knowledge and experience?

Thankx!

[thealien666]

Not to rattle your chains but, I think this belongs in that other thread you've mentioned named: "Is Moog selling out in cheap engineering?"

[Portamental]

Back in the 60's-70's, there was no computers, much less internet or video games. Electronics had matured just enough to provide simple IC's such as transistors, op-amps and such. Music, whether listening to it or playing in a band and electronics were the hobbies of choice for those not into muscle cars. Hi-Fi, vynils were fun and you could buy from the simplest Lafayette stereo receivers up to high end in DIY kits. The Radio Shack Catalog was half an inch thick, full of kits and parts.

Early synthesizers were build of those parts, and most of them are still available today. A vintage Moog is about electronics 101 level. And all the service manuals and moog schematics are available totally free on the internet.

Things changed in the early 80's with much more complex circuits. Analog went digital, CPU based, etc. as the years went by.. Look a todays electronics.. very reliable for the most part and also very cheap to manufacture, but when your 201x $40 Sony DVD breaks, it not even worth it to repair, you trash it and buy a new one. Warranties for your large TV are of the kind : bring it back and we'll give you a new one. Guess what happens when a defective unit goes back to the manufacturer... if it makes it this far anyway.

A few items, sometimes are worth repairing, that would include a Voyager for example, but service manuals are not available to the public, and are more challenging for technicians, and then, what if you need a proprietary chip not available anymore. What if you don't have a copy of the firmware, or no computer to load it anyway. These kind of electronics are better serviced by the manufacturers, while they can that is.

I still have a few film cameras that are worth repairing if the mechanics break, but already, I trashed a few digital cameras that are just out of date and worth nothing.

My bet is that 50 years from now, if there is no more Moog company to service those items.. assuming they still do service them anyway, the will be more Minimoogs, Prodigy and MG1's in working order than there will be 201x Voyagers. Or you can build your own.

Case in point : What it the life expectancy of your $600 iPhone ??

While Moog products are still "boutique", the company is drawn into larger scale integration and marketing strategies that will insure the it's survival. It's not as if they have much other choices. I would be curious to see sales numbers two years from now of Korg's new mini MS-20 vs SubPhatties. The SPH is a little marvel, build of quality parts, conceived by a small team of qualified people, quite an accomplishment for the select few that want good as sound and a superior product. For Korg, the MS-20 is just business as usual, and because they are already a large company and everything manufactured in China, it will sell by the truck-load.

[Sweep]

Electronics is clearly one of the least green industries, and getting progressively less so. It's a seriously bad trend.

[thealien666]

Electronics is clearly one of the least green industries, and getting progressively less so. It's a seriously bad trend.

Yep. Especially with the shorter lifespan of millions of devices. Not necessarily because of poor quality and breakdowns, but also because of rapid obsolescence.

Apple is a big culprit in that domain.

But as for analog synths, I don't think it applies as much. Especially when everyone is still trying to get their hands on 40 years old instruments. The only synth I can think of that could be blamed for taking up space in landfills is maybe the DX7...

[Alien8]

Better? Neither is better. Better is a perspective.

Better for the consumer? Better for the company?

If you believe that green is the way, conservation, preservation, recycling, natural growth & decay rates, having vs not having, hard work is worth it... etc, then having a fully serviceable, large unit is the best.

If you could care less that you throw stuff away to a place you don't live in, I like it warmer, easy way out, lazy, take it all for granted then throw away is best. Remember companies don't fill landfills, consumers do.

For a business making electronics, the most profitable way is the outsource board manufacturing to the experts, who now use precision machines to make multi layer circuit boards. Those come at a huge discount when sold in bulk. The components that are soldered to those boards also come at a huge discount when bought in bulk. Along with this bulk quantity, size, repeat ability, tolerances and reliability become consistent, predictable and controllable so that multiples that are nearly identical can be sold.

Couple in the trend that electronics have always "needed" to be smaller, and you create a situation where you have components that you can't see.

What you get is a system that fails when a .005 cent component fails. Fully diagnosable, but impossible to repair at a low price.

From the users perspective, that cost is high because you may only use one or two units over a lifetime. To the business, it's much cheaper over the average number of units they make. They absorb the cost of developing and failures into their sale price / profit margin.

What the consumer gets is everything they want. The company also gets everything it wants. In the words of Muse "unsustainable". Because no one gets what they need.

Now look at older larger units that require service and can be serviced. Who fixes them? Not necessarily the person who sells them. The highly skilled service guys come at a price, components not so much. In the end you have a more organic less "perfect" system that takes skill to operate, like anything worth doing, you need to bee good at it. To have this it takes patience and passion.

Now add into the mix a world where immediate gratification is the trend. Patience can mean missed opportunities, lost income and lost jobs. Service to self ego consumption is how companies make money. Money apparently means something.

This leaves a consumer who wants what they want now, and has no idea what they need. Companies love this because they get to prey on these consumers. That's the extreme case, but exists almost everywhere. When you sell a product that everyone wants, and no one can fix, those times when it breaks means that the consumer is coming back to you again.

So which is better is an opinion. My opinion is that community, sharing and caring for our planet is "better". It feels right like Musick feels right. Capitalist greed and mind slavery, or the choice to be controlled are not they way I would like to live. Once the whole world stops taking itself for granted none of this will matter, and we can all have Moogs that satisfy everyone.

For now, I'm going to love what I got until it breaks, then I will make a choice to replace, repair, or move on... I recommend you do what your passion tells you and stop letting forums decide for you.

[MC]

I don't get hung up on vintage this vintage that.

The tools I have are the best available in my personal assessment. Hammond XK3 and Yamaha P-90 are just two that I bought new - they do a great job emulating their namesakes. I have both the Minimoog D and Voyager because they both get sounds the other doesn't, and the Lintronics MIDI retrofit for the the Minimoog brings it into the 21st century.

One tool that I prefer vintage is polysynths. With the exception of my Andromeda, the new stuff sounds too clean and just doesn't cut it, they don't sound dirty and full like the old stuff. The SE Omega rack polysynth sounds great but the OS is buggy. I'm now hunting for a rack polysynth with decent modulation options and fat sound, and the only serious candidate is the old rev 4 Voyetra 8 which are hard to come by.

[EMwhite]

The biggest diff between SMT and through-hole from a maintenance and parts replacement perspective may seem to be form factor, but it's actually that AND that modern gear (and some through-hole has this as well) has embedded controllers which are not only attached to board by machine (good luck removing a 64 pin 1cm square IC without frying the rest of the components around or the board traces) but also contains code that we won't have in 15 years, let alone the gear required to program them. Every 18 months, a new micro-controller with new capabilities, whether it be raw processing power, DSP onboard, analog input/output, will be released and make the older stuff a thing of the past.

The generation of gear that I deem the "uncomfortable middle", which was between completely discreet (electronics 101 level as somebody pointed out) and today's today's gear, leveraged standard CPUs and memory with code in EPROMS much of which is still available, but also lousy nicad backup batteries, and custom ICs which are NLA. The former reeked havoc on electronics and resulted in much of the gear ending up in the scrap heap; the latter had small production runs of SSM/Curtis-like chips which are gone now, only available at load shark pricing, or available from China and counterfeit/inferior. MemoryMoog is one (unreliable) of these victims, my Kurzweil 250 is one (Digital to Analog converters which I'm not sure I'll be able to source except from a donor unit) also; early to late 80's era.

One hopes that the reliability of Sub Phatty/Minitaur will stand the test of 30 years; that tiny caps won't dry up as vintage do, that embedded controllers wont develop amnesia (lose their executive level code, the bit that allows new firmware to be flashed via USB).

I have an Old School and love it; but looking at the analog board (um, THE board) scares me to the extent that there are dozens and dozens (64 I quickly counted) of ICs and I really don't know what each does. All of the caps, resistors, diodes, some of the op-amps, etc will all be around for the next 30 years (hopefully!) but whether there is something there that Moog sourced that did the job at the time and may not be available in 20 years (e.g. in the above example, Curtis chips) is not known and won't be until somebody does some deep reverse engineering or Moog publishes the full schematics.

Depending on your Voyager, you may be one level removed from my Old School which means that newer Digital boards ARE SMT. Taurus III is a hybrid of SMT and through hole but the boards are generously spaced.

But which SOUNDS better? Hmmm... good question. Speaking from an Oberheim perspective, many people say a vintage SEM sounds better than a Tom Oberheim SEM reissue; but it's fractions different and Tom did a great job bringing it up to date.

[MC]

Depending on your Voyager, you may be one level removed from my Old School which means that newer Digital boards ARE SMT.

There are two versions of the digital board for the Voyager. The early ones are 128 user patches and THT, newer ones are seven banks of 128 and SMT.

The REALLY early Voyagers - Signature series 1st 600 units - have IC sockets throughout.

The Old School uses the exact same analog board as the Voyager. That is from Cyril Lance.

[GovernorSilver]

Dammit I knew I shouldn't have sent for the hardware upgrade to get 7 banks or whatever.








(j/k)

[~Sinedrifter~]

Hey thanks a lot guys! It's not like Alien8 assumes - that I am hoping the forum makes some kind of decision for me - but rather that I am trying to learn more about how analog works from you guys, who have been doing this longer than me. While I'm seldom on forums, I have learned a lot here since signing up. Good stuff!

I can tweak my synths and design the sounds I want rather easily. But still it's the world inside the synth itself that's so foreign. I once had a choice when I was going to take the deepest of plunges into the analog world: a new Voyager, or a Source that was listed on ebay for $2000 that the owner said was as good as new, since he was the original owner and more of a collector than anything else. The pics looked great (really, it was beautiful), but I bought the Voyager instead and she's great. What kept me from the Source was thinking (wow, at 30 something its days are probably numbered anyway, and the Voyager... wow what a beauty!). My assumption regarding the Source's age was pretty much off the mark, then.

Like I said, after reading the stuff in the thread on build quality, it got me wondering if vintage is ever worth it vs. new, though, I'm thinking in terms of serviceability. I'm kind of a tomboy and I like fixing & building stuff, and don't care for throwing things away before trying to fix them. In that regard it's not so much about how vintage vs. new sounds, since that's all so subjective, but it's more of an empirical matter as I wonder which is more likely to last a long time. I don't care as much about cost either; instead, I want it to last.

It's really amazing to see how SMT, as it seems to be "modern technology," has some serious drawbacks for the owner and advantages for the manufacturer. I did a bit of a Google search and it seems as though there's an art to THT. That's hot! I don't know, I've always been intrigued (and confused) by this stuff.

Wow, the older Voyagers are THT? I wonder if Moog would convert the newer SMT stuff to THT (like a sort of retrograde.)

[thealien666]

Wow, the older Voyagers are THT? I wonder if Moog would convert the newer SMT stuff to THT (like a sort of retrograde.)

Just to clarify one important thing: in ALL Voyagers the main analog soundboard, the one that actually produces sounds, is all THT and DIP chips along with big discrete transistors (it's a multi-layered board on top of that).
Only the secondary digital processor board, on later Voyagers, is SMT for the CPU, memory, AD/DA converters, etc...

Here's what it looked like inside my Voyager EB (back when I had one).
The board on the right (the main analog sound board) hasn't changed since the introduction of the Voyager over 10 years ago. The CPU board (with early THT) is on the left.

[Kenneth]

Remember companies don't fill landfills, consumers do.

Well said. Everyone would do well to remember this.

[Voltor07]

The pics looked great (really, it was beautiful), but I bought the Voyager instead and she's great. What kept me from the Source was thinking (wow, at 30 something its days are probably numbered anyway, and the Voyager... wow what a beauty!). My assumption regarding the Source's age was pretty much off the mark, then.

The Source was the first Moog to have a computer chip inside of it. It had a digital interface, and is currently prone to membrane button rot, which can be undetectable in photos. Luckily, replacements are easy to find. If the digital portion ever died, finding the proper parts to replace it would be very hard to get a hold of these days. Eventually, the capacitors would need replacing, especially if it was stored for 20-30 years.

[latigid on]

Where there's a will there's a way. Look at the Rhodes Chroma: thirty years out of production and it has great support from a dedicated community. Add-ons or replacements for MIDI kits, CPU, power supply, poly aftertouch, knob controllers and even re-builds of the voice cards are available or well documented.

Here's a time capsule idea: in thirty years computer technology might be fast and small enough to emulate obsolete logic chips. This is assuming we still have an intact society with enough resources to spare.