MATRIXSYNTH

5 Legendary Keyboards

According to mental_floss where you will samples along with why they chose them. No Yamaha DX-7?

via Mr. Array

The five are:
1. Mellotron
2. Hammond B3
3. Moog Minimoog
4. Synclavier
5. Fender Rhodes

New YouTube Audio Compression Stymies Uploaders

Update: image via Sonic State

Our friend Jexus, aka WC Olo Garb wrote in to let us know that YouTube has changed their encoding resulting in much lower quality audio. You can read about it on the Wired blog as well as this thread. Alternatives? Vimeo and Sonicstate TV, although the one thing YouTube does have is the community and exposure. You can see how many plays your videos get and you can see where they are coming from. I find it interesting to see how many hits a post here has generated for the video. I've had a number of people recognize the site because of this. Hopefully YouTube will correct the problem and others will build in the public tracking functionality of YouTube. What can you do? Not sure. Just be aware of it and chose your hosting accordingly. You can also chime in on the YouTube thread. If enough people speak out maybe they'll fix the problem. If you run a blog let your readers know.

The problem via Wired in a nutshell:
"Some YouTube users are mounting a growing revolt against the site's new audio scheme, which has degraded the sound quality of clips on the site by running them through an audio processor that wreaks havoc with songs' dynamic range (the variation between loud and soft), diminishing their sound quality.
This is not "compression" as in bit rate or file format, but in the audio engineer sense of the word: the smushing together of various volumes into a smaller dynamic range. This sort of compression doesn't affect slickly-produced, radio-ready music quite as much, since it's already so compressed, but it hurts any music that has been properly produced, and does more damage to nuanced recordings with lots of dynamic range."

Battling Seizure Robots

Battling Seizure Robots from Richard Lainhart on Vimeo.
"A jam with Moldover at Tranzducer .011 in Brooklyn, NY, on November 30, 2007. I play my Buchla 200e/Haken Continuum system, while Moldover works out on his controllerism rig. This is a completely spontaneous, unrehearsed, undiscussed improvisation, and the first time we've ever played together; while it's camera-audio only and so not the best quality, I think it's worth checking out. The complementary video improvisation was provided by Bert Baldwin.

("Battling Seizure Robots" is the name of one of the video animations I created for this performance, which, perhaps fortunately, you don't see in this clip.)"
http://www.otownmedia.com

Polivoks

images via this auction
"Duophonic analog synthesizer, with a 49-note (F-E) keyboard.
It features two VCOs, a noise generator, one LFO, a filter (low-pass and bandpass), and two ADSR envelope generators.
VCO1 can be cross-modulated by VCO2. Each ADSR can be switched to auto-trigger, each with independent rates.
The sound is quite rich and somewhat harsh and aggressive. This is more of a space-synth.
You can be sure that you will have never heard the sounds this one can produce.
It sounds like these old Yamaha CS-30's, but then fat filters like in Moogs. Produced in 1980x.
The supply voltage - 220-230V/50Hz. For use with 110/127V, a voltage converter is necessary.
POLIVOKS has 5-DIN output connections (adapter to 1/4 jack included). No midi, no CV/Gate are installed.
Dimensions - 780x490x195mm
Weight of synth only - 16.00 kg"