Of all the plugins you've been involved with, this is my favorite one. It has that fragile feel I'm looking for in most plugins but rarely find. The distortion from the 2nd nonlinear dist is beautiful. Well worth the money on my iPad.
I was just entertaining the same thought. The company believed it was investing in novel telecoms test equipment, but the guys who designed and built this unique module were clandestine ambient analog glitch groovers -- decades before lesser mortals invented that particular genre.
Back in the 50s and early 60s engineers figured out how to get mainframe computers to make music by splitting off lines to peripherals such as printers and writing code such that the signals to the printer line would make tones. The IBM 1401 computer was known to be used for this, and Johann Johannsson made an album called "IBM 1401 A User's Manual" dedicated to his dad who was an engineer on it back in the old days.
Tom Dissevelt and Kid Baltan kinda did similar things in the Philips Physics Laboratory. If you search for those names you'll probably find the music they made and some pictures of their studio.
In 1973, a whole 50 years ago, I was a junior engineer assisting with trials of 24 channel PCM for long distance telephony, a whole 1.5Mb/s over analogue lines (UK). The techie guys from "Headquarters" were very interested in things which would affect the quality of the transmission. They used something similar to inject impulse and pseudo-random noise, and to change other characteristics of the line. They then checked the quality of the decoded audio, only 8 bits sampled at 8kHz but enough for voice. It's so long ago I can't remember what the equipment was, but I'm sure it wasn't this one. I do remember a lot of very expensive Wandel and Goltermann test kit being around.
W&G makes one, and there was an official Western Electric one as well. The communications lab at Georgia Tech had a rack of line simulators from Northern Telecom.
That 8 bits would not be a linear amplitude, but something called “µ-law” or “A-law”, which is a logarithmic encoding. This gives a more consistent S/N over a greater dynamic range. which is better for voice. It is still used for digital telephony today.
I remember having to test for quantization distortion using a 1k, 16 down tone (-16dbm) inserted at the originating end and measured at the receiving end with a meter having a special notch filter to cut the tone leaving any noise created by bad PCM encoding for measurement.
@@TesserId Quantization is interesting. With a simple signal (e.g. a sine wave), it’s “distortion”. But with a complex signal (e.g. a full orchestra playing), it’s “noise”.
@@ffunyman I know I'm late and there's now a vst plugin for it, but I'm pretty sure this is from the 1970s. Any patents that might've applied are now long expired
These old warm analog noises do the same thing to me that certain music keys or chords do: They immediately bring out these positive emotions once had far in the past. Wonderful sounds, my friend. I so appreciate you showing these devices, and the manner in which you demonstrate them.
A family member in Cali is making a significant income using some old test gear in mastering, funny thing is everything else is in the box, I was surprised he had never heard of Hainbach. 😱 Me I have an electribe with tubes and that is enough analog for me, we can hardly afford to turn on a microwave here in Sweden, but at least the electric company can profit from the poor folks misery in Ukraine.
In fact, this line simulator is essentially a synthesizer in its own right, with oscillators, filters, noise source, and amplifiers. The original engineers just never conceived of its musical uses. Isn't it funny how some of the least musical things end up being the best musical instruments?
My dad was a telephone guy, used to take me to the big switching office where you would hear these enormous rooms full of relays clicking. Sounded like his job involved this sort of equipment so this is awesome.
ha my dad also took me to one of those rooms full of relays while he was a technician for telecom. im imagining now that a lot of dads taking their kids there to show off the cool clicking rooms.
Were they really relays, or were they Strowger switches? The latter would go something like “CHUG-CHUG-CHUG” from 1 to 10 times in a row, depending on the digit you dialled. Then a pause and a different noise, then the next digit.
It was probably commissioned to be designed & built for one phone co, say, Bell Atlantic for example. a certain amount were made, for training and diagnostic purposes no doubt. and so yes, highly rare units I'm sure.
@@dbspecials1200 lol I just remembered having a field test handset to test line quality, a completely passive device, should have hooked it up to something but sold it for the leather case haha
I think it actually was "digital data transmission", that "date" was a typo. My guess is that this was used for testing prototypes of modems, which do, indeed, transmit digital data over noisy phone lines. This would be a way of testing your company's new modem for adverse conditions it would experience in the field.
I agree. It was for development, not for maintenance or repair. So I agree with those who say this is probably as rare as hen's teeth. Maybe one per modem manufacturer.
After hearing the 2nd half of this video, I reckon the manufacturer should've just called it 'Delia Derbyshire In-A-Box' What an interesting and fantastic piece!
When I worked at General DataComm in the 1970s, the Axel Line Simulator was part of my test bench for 208 B/A modems. We used these to simulate line noise and phase shift conditions to test the modem's ability to correct errors. Another tool we used in conjunction with this was the Sierra 1914 test set.
I love finding fun things in electronics. One of the o-scopes I used in the Navy could play a _Space Invaders_ type game if you pressed a sequence of keys. A shipmate found this hidden deep in the documentation that came with it. The game was called "Secret Test Mode" in the manual so of course he immediately tried it out. You had to figure out what knob to rotate to move the base and what button to press to shoot. And yes, back in the 80s it was really boring onboard a ship so we would find anything to read or watch.
This is my favorite kind of gear, where the crazy sounds it makes are all secondary characteristics that weren't intended in the design, but they are the most valuable asset they have all these decades later.
For 13.7 billion years, the universe evolved towards its ultimate destiny: the mating of the Axel Electronics Telephone Line Simulator Model 771 with a softly spoken German sound designer. IT IS ACCOMPLISHED! HAIL THE BLEEP! 🙏
Whenever you do a video on equipment that was never meant to make music, I find it an experience of wonder and awe of what you're managing to do with such things. Sonic exploration through constant experimentation is practically new and my favorite frontier, but still something if wrangled within the confines of a keyboard scale, can be extremely beautiful and rewarding. I await your next discovery, and play with things that are out of the ordinary.... Like going into "Buchla territory" like (or unlike) Morty Subotnick, or finding new and unknown electronic instruments as you have been. Absolutely a big thanks for sharing. I didn't even know there was the Axel bank until i hit some buttons to refresh it. Now it's time to create too!
Incorporated in 1904 as General Railway Signal Company, started as a railway systems supplier, I didn't know there is a Jaimaca in New York, cool unit.
Back in college, in the late 70s majoring in electronic music at Grinnell College, I worked one summer for two brothers whose wealth came from their fathers invention of the tones for touch tones, I guess the whole Sounds behind that. Made frickin millions. Omaha. Western Electric. We used to see weird things around pawn shops in Omaha like this 45 years😢 ago.
I suspect the telephone thing might be a red herring and it is actually rail road signal testing equipment. The hint on the device in that Axel is a unit of General Signal, formerly general railroad signals company. Hainbach, have you taken off the cover? Any chance of an interior shot? There is sometimes circuit diagrams glued on the inside of the cover but I’m guessing you’ve already checked for that? Wild speculation, In the 70’s they where diversifying so it makes sense they would spin off units to service there existing rail road business.
There has either to be a project made that is replicating the old unit, bit by bit or taken into the now with altered components, but still retaining its old style, i mean holy moley that is cool ! If there are any schematics that came with it, dear hainbach, please release them or post them to some forum like diygroup or so, so the diy community as a whole can go crazy with this... maybe develop a pcb or atleast understand better what is going on in there. Too cool to die and it would be sad if only a very limited group is able to play with it. :) Nice find !
@@Hainbach Thats a pity... But very very nice that you did that ! There could be a real shematic around... atleast i would think that... i mean there has to be a service manual somewhere. The question is, who can be asked for something like that...
This thing is amazing! Isn't it interesting, though, how you can get such a distinct and maybe new vibe from a particular arrangement of the same old synthesis/signal processing building blocks that you already have an abundance of in your modular platform. Like there's abolutely nothing novel at all in the *components* of the Moog DFAM, and of course I already have them all in my modular (many times!) but somehow it still successfully leads me down different paths
Great demo of a remarkable device. The effect introduced from 2:06 sounds rather like ring modulation to me, imparting a more metallic timbre. The resulting tones are reminiscent of some of Tristram Cary’s experimental soundtracks.
It’s a very effective treatment - the sum and difference tones of ring mod, plus the additional harmonics generated by overdrive. The early Dalek voices for Dr Who benefitted from the gritty distortion possible with the valve-based ring modulator used at the time.
Crossbar exchanges used Multi Frequency Code for internal signalling. One could plug an audio monitor into a marker rack and monitor the signals. It was very random but musical. Another bit of kit was the AET or automatic exchange tester which generated MFC tones. I still use recordings from one to this day.
BTW, the jitter circuit is likely a ring modulator (or such) with one input being a carrier made unstable by an LFO. That one input will likely be a carrier frequency out of the range of hearing, but it's hard to predict exactly what that is. If audible (which it might not be, as this is more a concern for data circuits carrying phase shift (yeah shift) keyed modem signals), it should sound like a warbling vibrato.
i've been thinking about it for a while but i'll finally get the noises plug in soon, these sounds are too good!! thank you for making it available, also loved the track!
I came here from the plugin video lol. What a beautiful synth and piece of gear! I gotta pick up Lines and run it through a bunch of multitap delays and stuff haha
I often find electronic devices like this produce more interesting and mysterious sounds than purpose built synthesisers. Maybe it is because I got in to electronic music from my child experiences in the sixties of being mesmerised by the old style windscreen wipers which had their own motor. These sounds seem more organic.
That is so creative. How did you even come up with the idea to use that for this? I mean, I have an entire electronics lab filled with instruments I've gathered for actual purprose, if I saw this (before I saw your video) I would have skipped something like this, but now - wow - I never knew how versatile a unit like that could be with music, that's actually awesome.
Oh I just went down a rabbit hole a few years back and now I find joy in using test instruments for music. Usually I just make a guess while looking at the front panel.
One of the phenomena this device simulates is known as group delay. Essentially that means that different frequencies will travel at different speeds along a telphone circuit, depending on the characteristics of the circuit. When circuits went between cities on High Frequency coaxial cable links the filters in the HF system would introduce group delay and equalizers would be added into the circuit if it was allocated to carry data. This was also true of circuits that were routed as audioon purely copper cable routes. For voice transmission group delay made no difference, as far as I remember. I still have an old HP Group Delay Analyser under the bench in my garage. Circuits were allowed certain limits before they were deemd unsuitable or in need of equalistion. We never had one of these line simulators. I suspect they were used by designers of test gear and equalisers, not humble technicians, like me, setting up and testing circuits. We also tested for frequency response, impulsive noise and psophometric noise.This Axel simulator seems to mimic most of these charcteristics.
This title instantly brings back memories of my early days with modular synths (I'm dating myself lol, I mean like 7-8 years ago hehe), when I happened to patch a square wave to an oscillator's pitch cv in, and it sounded like the most clearcut telephone ring signal I've ever heard. Very cool device right here, would fit right in among any modular kit. Also, good point about limiters in feedback patches - very literally getting into the field of cybernetics at this point btw lol.
Thanks so much. I really am blown away by this. Those engineers that designed this line simulator probably were synthesizer DIY types that convinced the phone company management that they really needed this unit for line testing when it really was more like an "Avant-garde" modular synthisizer they can play with at lunch or after hours. LOL Very inspiring !
Just an FYI, the worlds first integrated network was created for link up of Soviet SAM/ABM systems. Not only it had to work, but it had to work with full redundancy, in environment of EMP and cascading power failures. It did work then, and fundamentals of signal processing are used to this day.
I found an article in a pdf file of Elektor 1979-03 where on page 28 this machine is briefly described. Apparently the machine is assembled by Axel but is in fact Wandel & Golterman in the UK.
Some of those effects remind me of the Eletronic Dream Plant Wasp synth of the late '70s. I had two Wasps hooked up to a keyboard called a Caterpillar.
I used to be in telecom. When I started, in 1993, point to point analog data lines for modems were still in use. This box seems like it would be for test and development of modems.
Thanks Hainbach, for this detailed equipment review. My geeky comment? That Gefell mic you are using sounds great on your voice! Throughout the 1990s I used a Microtech Gefell M 71 daily, doing commercial voice over sessions for national & local clients. Smoooooth sound with good definition in the high freqs!
You're in heavy right now aren't you 😏👍 Jerry Goldsmith would have loved this thing back in the 70s.........maybe he had one??? This is one of those down the rabbit hole boxes.......so easy to get lost in all the sonic journeys! ☺🙏
If I'm not mistaken this would have been used by the telecom company to generate a signal (i.e. simulate a phone or other end device) so they could set the upstream on the amplifier
It's for simulating a noisy phone line to test the ability to transmit a digital signal on it. It's probably used in the development of digital telephone equipment.
