[A6] re :some waveform observationsIII

[cgould11 at tampabay.rr.com]

> it has the newest os,
> other tested A6 +the new board exactly show the 
> same "tolerance"

Interesting. Maybe there are variances between 
mine (I bought late January 2001 if I recall) and
today's boards for all I know. 

> and about the aux-tip: i surely was very careful 
> when trying that tip, 
> all precautions as mentioned were taken and you 
> can believe me on that 
> ,after 24 years of working with electronic music 
> and studio , i wouldn't make that mistake.

Right. But if you have a feedback loop, it seems
odd for what I imagine is a single component to
fail (having the two jacks next to each other fail
does not indicate a failure in other parts of the 
synth, and its on the output board/section only). 
I imagine the feedback loop process is fine.

> honestly believe it or not the A6 is a compromise
> between price/ possibilities and also quality. 

I really don't know any synthesizer that is not 
this way. The Alesis Andromeda build quality is 
not up to the standards of the old Roland gear, but
the original price of the JP-8 was somewhere in
the $5000 range. That is a $12,000 synth in today's
terms. In contrast, Alesis's $3000 sale price is
$1200 in 1980 dollars. Think of it that way. :)
[Obviously there are more custom alternatives, such
as the $4500 Omega 8, if you want a bit more of the
old style.]

Electronics now cost much less; it
is mechanics that suffer the most, along with 
perhaps some in the manufacturing methods. [There
are those out there who despise any chip-based
oscillator method; the Jupiter 8 is a discrete 
based synthesizer so as far as tone goes I would
expect it to be richer than the A6 or any other 
chip-based synth (including the P5, Obies and the
Memorymoog). However, I expect tuning to be more
instable. :) ]

I will say I have owned a MKS-80, and played a 
Prophet 5 and Memorymoog a decent amount in my youth
(keyboard instructor had em). The MKS-80 was fairly
stable, more than the A6 on temp tune only, but 
also more sterile and still would go out of tune
occasionally. The P5 I recall being about as stable
as the A6 I got know, albeit a faster tune. The
Memorymoog, tuning wise, just sucked. And while I 
did gig with the MKS-80, frankly I would've been
scared to gig with the P5 or Memorymoog then and 
now. I certainly don't want to hark back to the days
where a keyboard tech was needed for every farkin'
gig, as was likely if you carried around certain
instruments of the time. So as far as build quality
goes, not all of them were hunkie-dory for sure.

As far as tuning goes, I don't know. Frankly I 
only notice the microtonal differences when the 
synth needs to be retuned. It may be some of the
temp resistors are not working properly if you are
only relying on temperature tuning (background 
tuning is fine). I personally don't notice any
sort of beating on the default Alesis patch. This 
sounds weird to me, can't tell unless I heard maybe
a captured sound and see what you are talking 
about as far as beat freqs go. I don't recall
hearing beat frequencies on my patches, maybe you
can load a few I posted and see if you get greater
beating?

Oh, btw, are you using background tuning, temp 
tuning, or no tuning? Actually *no* tuning is one 
mode I really haven't been impressed with on the A6,
it doesn't seem to make for a big gain in warmth
and really adds a lot to the instability of the
synth. Some people like it. I've been happy with
temp tuning only. I do think with background tuning
on the synth starts sounding, er, DCO-ish. It is
an analog synth though. Maybe all synths are
slightly different. That's supposed to be part of
the charm. :)