Technical Diary #1

I will hopefully be writing one of these diaries a week, outlining design and work done every week.

This week's diary will be an overview of the modular architecture that will be used.

To build one of these synths, you will require

1) The case/keybed/pots/PSU/mainboard. These are all necessary to co-ordinate the analog side. Projected cost ~$500.

2) The desired number of voices. A voice kit consists of 3xVCO boards, 1xFilter Board, 1x Modulation board and 1x digital control board. These will be easily installable. Simply stack each board ontop of the other (i.e Voice 2's VCO's ontop of Voice 1's), connect the cables to the power supply, the digital control board and the main board, and flip a switch to signify that the voice is installed. Projected cost per voice ~$400.

Introducing

The Sinth (Working title) project is an open-source polyphonic analog, designed using modern components and methodologies. It will take shape in a keyboard, with a basic 4-voice version. The voice count will be expandable using cheap kits ($~400) to up the voice count.

The feature set is as follows.

Per Voice

3 VCO's, with Sin, Pulse, PWM, Triangle and Saw waves.

2 Multimode Filters offering 24dB Lowpass, 24dB Highpass, Comb Filter, Bandpass

3 Digital LFO's, offering basic waves aswell as wavetables.

3 Digital envelopes. ADSR, loopable.

White/Pink/Brown noise generator

Entire synth features

VCA with overdrive

Extremely complex modulation matrix

Multitimbrality limited only by voice count

Modular construction (Insert and remove modules as wanted)

Full MIDI compliance with CC's for all knobs.

Close to 1 knob per function (Using a UI similar to the Virus C onwards)

1 Balanced Stereo Output Pair

1 Unbalanced Stereo Output Pair

1 Headphones Output

1 Mic-level Stereo Output Pair

CV Outs for envelopes and LFO's (One voice only, selectable. Thats alot of outputs if we do all voices)

6x General purpose CV inputs, selectable in the modulation matrix.

61-Key keyboard, brushed aluminium finished with cherry cheeks.

I will update this post with the latests specs.

Projected cost is $500 for keyboard and mainboard with no voices. Each additional voice will be ~$400 dollars ontop of that.

Check the Gearslutz thread

Check out the gearslutz thread here