Synapse Magazine Online Archive

wow!

whoa, eno interview done by kurt loder?

I was going to post highlights but stopped when I realized I wanted to post 14 pages from the first issue I was reading

oh wow.
m.

WHOA.

That November/December 1977 kills.

^^^^^^

"cover"

wow!

easily the coolest thing i've seen all week. thank you mp.

There's a new one up, The Summer 1978 issue, with a big feature on DEVO.

http://www.cyndustries.com/synapse/intro.cfm

Cyn Webster is great, btw. A cool person.

Thanks, Milton! I missed this thread the first time. The reviews are almost as much fun as the flanger ads.

Sequential Circuits Prophet 5 "The primary advantage of this instrument is that, for me, it sounds good."

Genius.

love the bit where synapse dude asks devo about their latest hardware acquisitions - "we just got real cases for our synthesizers, so we don't have to carry them in cardboard boxes anymore."

not to mention that the synapse dude is patrick gleeson

we really need a hardbound book of this magazine's complete run, advertisements and all. though that'd be practically impossible to license.

I liked the interview w/ NED where he describes this new digital technique called SAMPLING.

what the hell is this thing

also love this:

"Like bloated slugs in the middle of a lettuce field, we civilized people hot in touch with the New West marvels of our stupid shitworth culture are reduced to talking about the Screamers"

found glenstegner's post from Synths that never made it out of the gate

Coupland Digital Synthesizer (1978). Read about it in an old Keyboard magazine from 80s. One was introduced at '78 NAMM, but the designer Rick Coupland had problems with the prototype, it kept breaking down, investors (Micor Corp.)bailed out, the rest is (non)history. It was quite an advanced concept for its time, was supposed to compete with the Synclavier I ('77).

That 2-parter article in "Keyboard" abt the various early digital super-synths that failed was fascinating. The one I always dug was the Kineticsound Prism (iirc it was $36,000), which got reviewed in "Sounds" in something like 1982. Bubble memory, and a touch-screen! IIRC the actual synthesis method was phase-distortion, which later turned up in the Casio CZ101 ($99 off e-bay, no doubt)

I worked with my old friend Rick Coupland on the Coupland Digital Synthesizer, especially the conceptualizing in 1973 and 1974 (while we were designing and bilding the infrastructure of the Ramada Inns/Micor hotel reservations system). We independently invented the waveform buffer, a technique to maintain very accurate frequency by having only the most significant bits of the phase counter address the buffer, and a sneaky multiplication circuit that used a weird logarithmic representation ( I think it was log base square-root of 8) for applying the attack/decay/sustain/release to each output channel. This trick was to avoid the very expensive and heat generating multiplier modules on the market at the time.

The original synthesizer used only 8 bit output, but was 16-voice real-time polyphonic and had an 88 key keyboard. We discovered an aliasing effect that was not due to the sample rate or A/D post filtering, and determined it was caused simply by the quantization effects while still in the digital logic (this is an odd concept that needs more explanation than I can give here). We applied dithering of the master clock to make it go away without noticeably affecting otherwise affecting the sound.

The project then gained funding from Micor and was expanded to include modern packaging and a touch sensitive keyboard. It was changed to 12 bit (better IC's were available by then), and the team included a professor of music from UofA.

It was rushed to the trade show (a marketing decision resisted by the technical people), poor Rick was hyped in the marketing literature (against his wishes), and the subsequent difficulties in keeping it working were embarrassing. Both versions used all MSI TTL logic and lots of wire-wrapped prototype boards, which is why it failed at the show.

The second version had a stylish production packaging and a futuristic touch-sensitive console above the force sensing keyboard. Internally was a Texas Instruments 990 mini (or perhaps, by then, the 9900 IC - don't remember) which provided the user interface and did the non-real-time FFT's required to transform from the harmonic-spectrum based voice construction into the time domain waveform buffer. The prototype was shown to several top popular musicians, who were very impressed and wanted to buy the units, but it never made it to production. Rick still has the original prototype. I believe that original 8 bit prototype was given to University of Arizona, where it's fate remains unknown.

What was the actual synthesis method used in the Coupland machine, then? IIRC the Synclavier was digital FM, the Fairlight was sampling & additive, Prism was Phase Distortion, McLeyvier & Audity were analog subtractive under the hood, how did this one make its sounds?

summer 1979 issue up, fripp / moraz / gleeson

also, how great is John Moore's post? hats off

yes, cheers

best noise board googler ever

yeah i remember that. wish things like that still happened on ilm.

march 1978 up

if only ilx wasn't 100x worse than phpbb 1.0