Hello Mr Sonology, I sold you this recorder! VERY nice to see this machine working again!! In the time i had this machine i tested the machine by using a ReVox G36 beside this one to give the tape the right speed. I remember that the new tape was much to good for this old system, how did you tackle this problem? Anyway, good to see that this machine is now in a museum!
Leuk om Dick zo op z'n oude dag te zien. In mijn herinnering blijft hij een vijftiger. Dick was mijn 'baas' in de studio voor elektronische muziek van het Koninklijk Conservatorium. Boeiend om naar hem te luisteren en de filosofische manier waarop hij naar de dingen keek.
Many consider the A80RC to be the best of the A80 2-track machines. The VU’s had additional wiring and electronics in the path to house the electronics in the meter bridge above the deck, the RC keeps it all underneath. Many A80RC’s also came with ‘butterfly heads’ which some (not all) consider desirable. The RC also utilised the audio cards from the earlier B62 (Full discreet electronics), where as the MK 4 VU’s were much later machines and utilised many IC chips and did away with input and output transformers in search of a ‘cleaner’ sound… Many consider the earlier, transformer-balanced machines to offer a more pleasing sound. It’s all subjective of course, but that’s the general consensus on those machines.
The beauty of inserting a ring modulator in a feedback loop is that it will destabilize resonant peaks. Along with clipping, ringing feedback, where one resonant frequency sucks up all the energy, is the easiest thing to get out of feedback. Ring modulation will kick any sound off its central resonance, so it prevents any resonance from being too stable. Meanwhile, the delay will tend to enforce continuity, which prevents the sound from going into wide spectrum noise. The "1/3 octave filter" (no different from a graphic equalizer) allows the musician a great deal of control over the results. Really fertile ground for discovering sounds.
The 1/3 octave filter is very different from a graphic equalizer, which only allows attenuation or amplification of frequencies by 12 or 6 dB, whereas this 1/3 octave filter can complete remove frequency bands. Also, this 1/3 octave filter has no neutral setting: even when all bands are at equal levels, strong colourisations occur where the bands overlap and at the centre frequencies of the bands. The original B&K 1/3 octave filter was not designed to use all bandpass filters simultaneously but only one by one. This modified version has an input and output matrix which allows to send the input to all bandpass filters and mix their outputs. This modified filter is essential for the technique that is demonstrated here and the results would be very different when a standard graphic equalizer would have been used.
@@MrSonology ahhh ok thanks for clarifying in re the filter, which sounds more like a resonant filter bank (or maybe not I'll watch your video on the subject!)
I will say that there are a lot of ways to get vaguely similar sounds using reverb feedback, and I expect if you substituted a normal graphic equalizer, you'd get something cool. Without the resonances of that particular filter, you might not get the room-like switching from one tone to another, but even a 6db attenuation will quickly go to silence in a feedback loop.
Sad to hear of Jaap Vink's passing! He's been a huge inspiration fro my feedback works of the last few years! Glad to listen to this wonderful music to celebrate his life and work.
That's right. An Amplitude Demodulator (AMD) is an envelope follower. An Amplitude Modulator (AMM) is a VCA. A V-FUG (voltage-controlled function generator) is a VCO/LFO. These names were used already at the Institute of Sonology in the 1960s and we stick to them.
That is definitely possible. I have a version in Kyma which is entirely digital and sounds very close to the original. Just use digitaI delays. In Kyma I added a bit of filtered noise to the feedback loop. Listen to this: soundcloud.com/kees-tazelaar/erwachen-heiterer-empfindungen-bei-der-ankunft-auf-dem-lande. A description of the patch in Kyma can be found here: keestazelaar.com/music/e-pur-si-muove/. Good Luck!
would love to see that four-channel version of this video--and of course anything else you're willing to impart about some of Jaap Vink's later works (Tide, etc)
