If you mean the soundbox diaphragm, which is often a bit of corrugated metal foil, then those are different for different models. I'm not an expert, and can't find any information on Neuphonic, different brands were often sold under many names, maybe you can find another brand name somewhere? But otherwise they are probably replaceable with any diaphragm of the same diameter.
Your research is imperative. It would be amazing if you could run your tests through newly released grooveboxes, samplers and drum machines so producers can be more informed before purchasing the devices. In example, had i know the Ableton Push 3 was going to have such unstable midi to control external devices. I wouldnt have purchased it. It would be also nice to have comparisons to other gear like Elektron Digitakt 2.
I feel like an argument can almost be made that the RD9 is mimicking what the 909 was originally intended to sound like. I suspect that 7K filter was not originally intended to be there and only showed up after prototypes were exhibiting too much noise and a compromise had to be made. Regardless, it sounds like they really did their homework and the consumers are the real winners here.
I might sound like a bit of a heathen here, but I feel like if you're recording from the summed output, you're not quite doing it right. Whatever processing you want on the kick- for example- probably wouldn't sound as good when applied to the full mix. Plus recording individual channels means you can tweak their levels later on.
@@RegebroRepairs I only have the RD8 right now, but I have the RD9 on the way. It is a bit entertaining how many people will complain about a lack of individual instrument outs but will then just use the total output anyway.
Your review helped me shape a decision, I got myself a RD 9 , I have to admit, it sounds superbe , and the versatility of the instrument is very nice and capable.
t is is soooooo more fun than school lessons, i think i m gonna see it again for a 2nd time, very interesting and thanks for the very good tutorial/info!!
Thank you for sharing this! I have a made-in-England Columbia unit with this exact same issue and no idea what to do about it. Looking forward to attempting this repair and breathing new life into this old beauty. Many many thanks!
I feel the real comparison test is putting the sounds in a sequence, there's something interesting I remember, that when the claps are close together on the real tr909, they start sounding.... hard to describe it in words.
Enjoyed this very much. I liked seeing how you methodically went through this process with increasing understanding and troubleshooting. Being frustrated by MIDI Clock is almost a right of passage, but most people don't get to understand it the way you have. FWIW, when you must sync to the DAW and use devices that support MIDI Clock, it's far better to use a device like CLOCKstep:MULTI, Multiclock, etc. It's exactly the reverse of what you've done to make a reliable test. The clock output from the DAW is audio and goes to a device that can convert it into a much more stable MIDI Clock and then distribute it. Throw in a few other protocols like CV and Sync24, and you have Sync Hub for lots of gear. Even on OSes and DAWs that can output a reliable enough MIDI Clock, there can come a point where the project grows to such an extent that MIDI starts to suffer under load and these devices become well worth it.
Luckily my sense of rhythm isn't refined enough to have ever heard the 1-2ms delay in any MIDI signals. 😃 I don't generally use MIDI clock, but sequence everything from Ableton, but I would assume any MIDI signals suffer from the same delays.
@@RegebroRepairs When sequencing notes from the DAW a tiny bit of latency goes unnoticed by everyone for the most part. After all, you get that much latency just standing 3 feet away from the speaker. The killer moment is when MIDI Clock is being used to drive external sequencers and the clock begins to drift. It becomes a runaway train. The audio clock won't drift, if it does start running a deficit, you'll hear it in all the audio tracks the same (glitching) and the DAW will ultimately stop. Also one of the things the external sync hubs can be good for are making Latency adjustments close to the devices that are following the clock, especially if you monitor the synth audio back through the DAW and process it further in real-time as some people do, adding an addition stage of ADC and audio driver buffers. I understand this isn't you, I don't monitor back through the DAW myself either.
Why are the BPM values different for RD-6 and TD-3? Everything else in your table was going for 120 BPM but RD-6 is 127 and TD-3 is 117? That's off by quite a bit.
Thanks a lot, very interesting! It got me thinking that, could it be that some famous drum machines - like the original 909 or 707 - get their famous groove from having an inaccurate MIDI clock? The probability distribution you showed did not look gaussian to me - what if it is the unique shape of the distribution of clock irregularities that is the main contributing factor to a "unique groove"? This would have been a super cool follow-up video!
That distribution is reasonably Gaussian, although there is a weird spike, so it's probably a combination of what is practically randomness (all the process in Windows doing things) together with something that isn't random, causing that spike.
@@RegebroRepairs Right, forgot the distribution was from when you were using windows. Still - would be an interesting experiment I think :) A "well known trick" among house and techno producers is to use midi clock from 909 to get a better groove, even with shuffle on 0. If that's not just a myth, I would think it has something to do with clock irregularities. I might do the test myself when I got some spare time!
How i deal with this, knowing that ableton is shit with midi clock: i record each part and drag it so that it works in the mix. Or i work dawless and use one drummachine as master. Or i use the ERM multiclock and abuse the timing for each channel a bit to make it sound so i want to dance to it.
Are these measurements just the clock send of each device? My interpretation is that the feel/etc comes also from how a drum machine/etc syncs to an external clock while still playing its own rhythm (not acting as a sound module). I would think that this would be measured by the output sounds, and a comparison between the RD & TR could be recorded in one pass with identical patterns output from each machine as a mono feed routed hard left & right. Very interesting results nonetheless, I would suggest maintaining the fun in content - there seems to be plenty of burnout on the platform lately. Cheers!
Oväntat spännande! Har nog alltid känt att midiklocka varit instabilt och oförutsägbart vilket nog både berott på både instabila klockor men också noll koll haha. Har numera en MIDIhub som sköter klocka till allt i studion och det funkar fint sen nåt halvår tillbaks :)
Ja, jag kommer ihåg att för 20 år sedan läste jag nån intervju med en musiker som använder en 909 som master clocka för att den var så "stabil". Jag trodde det var BS, tills jag insåg att han sannolikt jämförde med nån slö Windows PC på 90-talet. 😀
Wow! I learned two things - the concept of "yak-shaving" ("raka en jak" in Swedish I suppose) and also why the MIDI clock on my Ableton Live performs so poorly compared to the MIDI clock from my trusty old Boss DR660. Great video and I would love to see the followup with the deepdive into the RD-9 and TR-909 comparison.
Thanks Lenhart. Happy to see my TD-3 can be of use again from now on. What are your thoughts about a plain Arduino setup? Arduino tutorials are basically build around a MIDI port, 2 resistors and 3 jumpers which I like to experiment with but have never really had the opportunity to pass through a rigorous timing test ... but your knowledge of electronics is better than mine and maybe you can foresee noise issues that could set the timing off without a proper filtering module ...
An Arduino that doesn't do anything but send a MIDI clock should be rock stable. And I don't think you need any specific filtering, 3.3V is a pretty loud signal, especially if you enclose it in a shielded box.
Lennart, many many thanks for compiling all this information and walk the extra miles of analyzing things in detail. I like how you´re turbonerding on this topic (and please take this as a compliment :D). In my setup, everything revolves around ableton link, ethernet based, and I wonder what the good options are to translate that into MC sent to a variety of hardware devices. Currently I use Bitwig, create an audio tick track via ERM plugin and send that to the multiclock device from the same company. It may be smarter to have that one as the master when doing hardware based music only, but I don´t like switching the whole sync setup between producing and performing. Again, many thanks for this useful and valuable information, I´m looking forward to see more once you find the time. Good things take time!
I have seen ads for devices specifically designed to create clock signals, but obviously I have no idea if they are any good, they usually cost hundreds of £$€, and I don't have any actual use of them.
@@RegebroRepairs Yes, the Multiclock is basically throwing (a lot of and too much) money at the problem, but for me it was the right decision. Now that I´ve played with a few other ways to get different clocks out to Eurorack (and a few desktop boxes), the value has become a bit less. Often using just the clock generator from Bitwig. ERM is still fun though, like mangling the clocks a bit': having 3 clocks straight and one a little shuffled, tomfoolery of this sort.
I'm impressed by those results from the Behringer devices. I can guarantee that having a Mac does not necessarily mean you get good MIDI clock out of it - I have done similar timing checks and found that MIDI out from my Mac via a MOTU MIDI Express 128 (over USB) gives spurious regularly recurring signals, when the only thing going through is MIDI clock and not MTC etc. I heard that part of the problem is the USB implementation as the data is packeted, but I don't know enough about that side of things to comment. Interestingly, machines we revere today as being 'tight' often have fairly sloppy clocks. The 808 is a discrete hardware clock and is absolutely not fancy in any way at all; the LinnDrum uses a 555. The sense of tight timing, I think, comes from every event happening simultaneously - when all the sounds hit together, even if each clock pulse is not 100% on beat, the hits are unified and not staggered as they would be if triggered using MIDI notes on a sound module, for example. If your kick and snare hit at the exact same time, does it matter if they're a millisecond off? Also, regarding my surprise at those Behringer figures - I've done some work with DIN Sync24, and as far as I've tested, none of the new gear - not one example - complies with the old Roland DIN Sync spec. The DIN Sync timing of Behringer and Arturia units with a DIN Sync option (out, not in) is abysmal. This, it seems, is because they don't reset the clock on Start, whereas the old Roland spec does: look at the service notes for the 606/808 etc and they explain that the clock runs continuously, even when the device is stopped. When Start is pressed, the clock is held low, there's an approx. 8mS gap to allow the device to reset fully, and then the clock starts again. There's a separate Run/Stop signal which is low for stop, high for run. Receiving devices hear the start line go high, and wait for the re-started clock to appear. Timing is tight and there's a consistent lag of 8mS after hitting Start. The problem with new units like Arturia and Behringer is that the clock is not reset, which means the lag on start varies according to the tempo of the clock, and little attention seems to have been paid to whether it's high or low at any given point. Rubbish, really. So I'm suprised their MIDI timing is so good!
There are Behringer units with DIN sync support!? I'm not surprised their MIDI is good, MIDI is important, after all. Not many people use DIN Sync any more. There are certainly other possible sources of instability that might affect OS X, yes. It would be interesting to try out Live on OSX and also newer versions of live on Windows.
@@RegebroRepairs Yes, the configurable clock on, for example, the RD-8 (and presumably the RD-9) can be set to 24ppqn, which is the rate for both MIDI clock and Roland's DIN Sync - the clock signal is on the tip of the minijack and the run/stop signal is on the ring. If a mono jack is used, the run/stop signal is ignored and only the clock is attended to.
@@synthnerd4539 Aha, they have a run/stop as well, I did not know that. Can't say I'm surprised that their DIN Sync implementation isn't good, not many use that anymore. old Roland devices usually have MIDI retrofits available.
The correct answers are: Bass drum C Snare drum B Low tom A Mid tom B High tom C Rimshot B Handclap C Closed HH A Open HH C Crash C Ride A Loop B Full answer is: Bass drum A) 909#2 B) 909#1 C C) RD-9 Snare drum A) 909#1 B) RD-9 C) 909#2 Low tom A) RD-9 B) 909#1 C) 909#2 Mid tom A) 909#1 B) RD-9 C) 909#2 High tom A) 909#1 B) 909#2 C) RD-9 Rimshot A) 909#2 B) RD-9 C) 909#1 Handclap A) 909#2 B) 909#1 C) RD-9 Closed HH A) RD-9 B) 909#2 C) 909#1 Open HH A) 909#2 B) 909#1 C) RD-9 Crash A) 909#2 B) 909#1 C) RD-9 Ride A) RD-9 B) 909#1 C) 909#2 Loop A) 909#1 B) RD-9 C) 909#2
10 out of 12 correct here. I own a TR-909. Not sure what revision it is, but the transients and the overall sound of the RD instruments are bright, thin and sharp by comparison. The OG sounds warmer and thicker throughout.
