Digisound 80-21

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Details:
"The Digisound 80-21 is a rare Voltage Controlled Digital Oscillator, and provides a very unusual sonic palette.

The Digisound 80 Modular Synthesizer was a (largely) kit-built synthesizer designed, primarily, by Charles Blakey who ran a small family-owned company called Digisound Ltd near Blackpool in northern England. Many of the early modules appeared as construction articles in two British electronics magazines - Electronics Today International (ETI) and Electronics & Music Maker (E&MM) in the early to mid 1980s.

The Project 80 series - a number of whose modules were based on the CEM (Curtis Electro Music Specialities) range of ICs - was not, however, his first collection of synthesizer modules. He had, previously, produced an early series (the Digisound 20000 series) based around the SSM (Solid State Microtechnology) range of ICs.

Here's a recent article from January 2000 about the Digisound modular written by Paul Nagle (a British composer of synth music and user of the Digisound synth) available in the internet archives of Sound-on-Sound magazine. To quote from Paul’s own web site "Great, smashing, super - this is an amazingly versatile, superb-sounding modular - full of character" - ‘nuff said!

All Digisound Synthesizer modules had a common package design, with modules interchangeable within the cabinet, common voltages, Input / Output impedances, etc. This made it quite simple to design a system, or change that system around if you desired a different configuration. The modules are compatible with the majority of the modular and performance synthesizers of the time, i.e. 1V/Octave exponential control voltage scaling, 0-10 Volt peak-to-peak control voltage ranges, and a regular gate trigger system.

I've been a big fan of Digisound Synthesizer modules since the late 70's, when I used to bug them and Aries Modular Systems for new catalogs! Over the years, I put together a large number of modules (along with Aries Modular, the USA equivalent).

This unit combines the flexibility of analogue voltage control with the clarity and realism of digitally generated waveforms. The design is fully compatible with existing synthesizer systems (1V/octave frequency control, 10V p-p output, linear and exponential modulation inputs) and offers the versatility of 32 different waveforms encoded as wavetables in the 2716 EPROM. A particular waveform can be selected with push button switches using a simple incremental system or a combination of a push button switch and suitable electronic pulses to the input. The useful audio range is 30Hz to 10kHz.

Much more great information can be found at Dave's Digisound Page."