"Looking at the Minimoog's amplitude envelope (Fig. 1) reveals that even with the sustain set to minimum, there's about 20-30 milliseconds where the sound stays at maximum level before the decay begins. There is no way to eliminate this short period of full volume sustain; it's part of the Minimoog's characteristic sound. It's also what happens to percussive sounds when you clip, limit, or compress them."Title link takes you there.
Hmm. Are you sure this clipping will still occur if you reduce the volume of the oscillator in the mixer section?
ReplyDeleteI don't think that's clipping. It's more of a delay in amplitude. Instead of the amplitude diminishing from the start, it holds and then diminishes.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure if some info I read was correct, but I remember someone saying that they thought it was a calibration issue. It does bring up the issues that when people are taking measurements out of curiosity or for making a VA recreation, there's always some doubt that their unit might not really be optimum sounding or the performance of some components have degraded over 3 decades.
ReplyDeleteNone the less this sounds like it makes sense and I'm talking about some of the smaller details in the sound. Certainly the broader more general aspects of the original sound from new instruments are more or less preserved on old recordings.
It's not the VCO's that are cliped but the envelope itself.
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