RME Scaling Out Of Adjustment Again! ??

Tips and techniques for Minimoog Analog Synthesizers
User avatar
glennfin
Posts: 20
Joined: Tue Jun 02, 2009 7:43 am
Location: Winston Salem, NC
Contact:

Re: RME Scaling Out Of Adjustment Again! ??

Post by glennfin » Thu Aug 23, 2012 1:37 pm

I sincerely hope you have a wonderful vacation. As far as providing "technical assistance", I'd be happy to answer any questions that I possibly can and if Moog Music wish to discuss salary - terms for providing technical support to their customers, I would be happy to entertain such an idea! :wink:

MC wrote: Oh, you're just in time.
I'm leaving for an extended vacation, with no access to email or internet. In my absence, you seem qualified enough to provide technical assistance to forum members, as I have for years. So glad to have an expert come along!
Moog RME

User avatar
thealien666
Posts: 2791
Joined: Mon Nov 14, 2011 8:42 pm
Location: Quebec, Canada

Re: RME Scaling Out Of Adjustment Again! ??

Post by thealien666 » Thu Aug 23, 2012 2:51 pm

As for the PSU itself being a possible cause of tuning problems, I also doubt that too. Switching PSU, like the one used in the Voyagers, are by design tightly regulated/filtered. But that doesn't mean that they can't fail, or intermittently send high frequency noise on the power rails if they're badly designed. That wouldn't affect tuning, but could explain some other failures.

As I said before, having seen my fair share of failing cheaply designed/implemented switching PSU (mainly in inexpensive devices like DVD players and such), resulting in either strange/unexplained behavior or simply failure of other components due to "noisy" power rails, I'd rather trust a good 'Ol linear type PSU over switching type any day. Especially for analog synths.

The main enemy of electrolytic caps is heat and ripples, and there's plenty of that in a switching PSU.

This is the PSU in a Voyager. Often, you'll see caps next to a heat sink (as seen here) because of how cramped components usually are on such designs. Those caps will fail prematurely, guaranteed. It's only a matter of time.

Image
Moog Voyager PSU


And, yes, the power connector on the main analog board (seen here) could have a poor connection resulting in unstable or under voltage power rail for the oscillators, that could affect tuning.

Image
Voyager analog board
Moog Minimoog D (1975)
DSI OB6
DSI Prophet REV2
Oberheim Matrix-6
Ensoniq SQ-80
Korg DW8000
Behringer DeepMind 12
Alesis Ion

Post Reply