MATRIXSYNTH: Early Hinton Modular


Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Early Hinton Modular

via Graham Hinton Hinton Instruments: "Briefly, it was developed in the early 70s as a very high spec instrument while I worked in a nuclear physics laboratory. I actually believed that the major manufacturers' published specs were true, so I met or bettered them. (It was quite a disappointment when I later worked in a studio with a Synthi 100 and found that it didn't come close by a long way. Same again years later when I got my hands on a large Moog modular.)

Brief spec:
Fully modular, hot pluggable 4U 19" rack mounting.
Every input has a voltage 3.5mm jack AND a summing Lemo 00 connector. So any input can have more inputs added as needed, mixers or the big matrix can be added. Or both with a Lemo T-piece.
Open collector (wire-OR) logic control on the rear panels. That's like Moog S-trig for Gates, but there were counters and other logic modules too. The Envelope Generators gave out logic pulses at each stage so two or more could be locked together at a particular phase or cascaded.
By '75 it had a 256 step digital sequencer programmed from an eight voice digital keyboard scanner, both built in discrete TTL. (It pre-dates microprocessors and synth chips.)"

Update: a close-up of the modules.

2 comments:

  1. Mr. Hinton: clap, clap, Clap, CLAP, CLAP!!
    This is the kind of stuff I really like.
    A DIY synth with this characteristics in the 70's I think it was not cheap to build. I imagine that R&D of Mr. Hinton widely exceeds to commercial products. It will be interesting to know something about the Generators and Multimode Filters.

    ReplyDelete

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