We’ve recently started stocking Alfa’s clone of the famous old Roland IR3109 filter chip. This is the chip that was inside a ton of Roland synths, including the SH-101, Jupiter 6 and Jupiter 8, Juno 6/60 and even the Juno 106, although in that case it was hidden in a potted module! I thought it’d […]
Last time we looked at reconfigurable filters, filters that include switches to rearrange parts of the circuit during normal use. However, that’s not the only way to produce different responses from a single filter circuit. This time, we’ll look at another approach: pole mixing. “Pole mixing”? It sounds like stirring a cake with a broom handle… […]
What is a “Multimode filter” anyway? It’s a filter which can provide more than one response. So it might offer a choice of 2-pole or 4-pole lowpass responses, or it might be switchable between lowpass and highpass, or it might have lowpass, bandpass, and highpass outputs. There are basically three techniques for building multimode filters, […]
I typically use the 12-bit MCP4822 DAC to produce a CV for the SSM2164 (or CoolAudio V2164, it’s the same thing) . This is a good, cheap combination. However, the 4822 produces an output of 0-4.095V, whereas the 2164 needs 0-3.3V. It is possible to use a simple voltage divider to reduce the voltage to […]
Like my SSM2044 page, this page is a look at how various synths implemented the CEM3320 filter, with the datasheet design as a reference standard. Whereas the SSM2044 is a dedicated lowpass filter, the CEM3320 is just a set of filter building blocks. In this respect, it is more like the earlier SSM2040. The CEM […]
This page is a look at how various synths implemented the SSM2044 filter, with the datasheet design as a reference standard. I’ve redrawn all the schematics to make comparisons very easy. First, the datasheet design. The datasheet suggests using the two differential inputs (+audio and -audio) as individual oscillator inputs for a two-oscillator synth […]
