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Looper's Delight
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hmm, wow! quite a chip on your shoulder there, Chuck. I actually wasn't thinking about the echoplex at all in noting this mono thing. Just that lots of people on the list have been confused by the stereo input and output jacks on the JamMan. People frequently thought this must mean the loop is also stereo, when it isn't, and a lot of folks were upset to discover this after they bought the thing. So when you started talking about "stereo JamMan", I just wanted to clarify things before we went through that whole scene again. as for your amusingly tangential echoplex jabs: At 09:25 AM 4/15/99 -0500, Chuck Zwicky wrote: >Sounds like 'the pot calling the kettle black' to me. The EDP has only a >single input jack and a single output jack, and even though the D/A in the >EDP is a stereo part, one channel is physically disabled! OOOPS! yes, the echoplex is mono. It's advertised as mono, has mono input, mono output, mono, mono, mono, mono a mono. I don't think it's any secret. Why our design decisions from 5 years ago provoke such hostility in you is beyond me, but since the codec troubles you so much, perhaps a little explanation will help: Matthias' original LoopDelay, from Paradis in '92, was mono. When we were updating it for the Oberheim version at G-WIZ Labs, a big goal was trying to reduce the cost since the original design was rather expensive. For the ADC/DAC, we found that the most cost effective solution with decent audio performance was the Crystal CS4248/CS4231a audio codec parts. These fit onto our processor bus very easily and allowed us to remove a lot of parts from the old design and cut a lot of costs out. So it was a great choice of part, and even had nice features like built in volume controls, DC blocking filters, anti-alias filters, etc. It happened that by that time, almost all digital audio parts were stereo anyway, so there was never any option of a mono ADC/DAC. So we had the extra channel there in the codec with no use for it. Since we were trying cut costs, not add them, putting in a lot of additional analog parts and adding a lot of board area just to connect up an unused audio channel would have been stupid. That would have just increased the price of the whole thing, and users would be paying for stuff that they couldn't use. That would have been a very poor engineering decision, which is why we didn't make it. If we had wanted to do true stereo at that time in the echoplex, it would have actually cost considerably more than the analog parts and board area, since we would have needed to use a beefier CPU instead of our dirt-cheap 68000, and add a lot more memory. The resulting cost would have been much too high to fit the market we were targeting at the time. >As far as a 'stereo' input, I use my Jam-man with an electric guitar. My >guitar produces a MONO output signal. I feel that the ability to control 3 >separate loops is far more useful than one 'stereo' loop. Particularly >since I can add/remove significant layers of the composition in real time. Well, of course people do lots of different things. For most people "stereo loops" means you can put a stereo signal into the loop and it will still be stereo when it comes out. I think a lot of people here use a great deal of effects before the looper, resulting in stereo signals. Obviously, they would want to be able to loop that in stereo. We accomodated that with the echoplex by making it possible to use two of them locked together as a stereo pair. Our sync scheme with the BrotherSync connection even syncs the sample clocks together, which is nice and prevents any odd phase problems. You do have to get two, which is not so great, but it's true stereo. Of course you can do much more than stereo with multiple echoplexes. Since you have complete control over each loop, and a nice user interface on each one, you have a good environment for serious multitrack looping. Also, you can put effects and eq independently on each loop input and output. With the BrotherSync, you can share syncs between all of them, allowing any of them to set the basic loop time for the others to sync to (or sync in multiples to it). And you can share your echoplexes with your friends for loop jams, all sync'd together like Brothers. ;-) To me, these things are much more fun than boring old stereo, but I actually use stereo all the time because it's just very practical. >I guess it ought to be noted that you would need three EDPs, three foot >controllers and a MIDI controlled mixer to do what I am able to do with >one >Jam-Man. Actually, just one midi pedal with a continuous controller input is all you need for this. Have each echoplex on a different midi channel and use a different bank on your pedal for each one. Loop volume out of the echoplex can be controlled with continous controllers, so it's easy to set the volume on each one to mix them. Or do some of the simple footpedal mods that people have discussed in the past, allowing the Oberheim pedal to be toggled between different units. Personally, I find it is much easier to control multiple loops with multiple control surfaces, since it is very clear which thing you are controlling and it is much faster. Plus, you can simultaneously do different actions on the different loops without having to fool around with anything on the controller. Much nicer user interface for me, if I was using Bob's jamman thing I'd want to do the same. I have to wonder, for what you are doing, why waste time with the JamMan at all? Seems like a lot of bother with limited memory, constrained I/O, lack of U/I, and weird midi control. Why not use something like the Roland SP-808? Or Acid on a laptop? Seems like those are much better suited to it. kim ________________________________________________________ Kim Flint, MTS 408-752-9284 ATI Research kflint@atitech.com http://www.atitech.com