The original envelope on the System-100 keyboard wasn’t really one of my favourite things about it. There’s precious little resolution on the decay slider for tuning in those tight bonky basslines, so I tend to end up moving the slider by infinitesimally smaller amounts to try and get the sound I want.
I should point out that it’s a different circuit to the possibly legendary System 100m ADSR envelope (“the snappiest adsr eg of the world…”). For once the hype is deserved, my stripboard 100m 140 clone felt super-snappy, with satisfying control ranges.
Let’s build the System-100 version anyway, maybe we can use different potentiometers or swap the timing capacitor size for something a bit smaller.
The rare-ish programmable unijunction transistor N13T1 was swapped for a 2N6027, although it has since been possible to get hold of the originals on eBay. The 700 LFO worked better with the N13T1, so that might be case here. I used 2SA733 and 2SC945 transistors as per the schematic, albeit the -GR variant rather than -Q, with 1N4148 diodes standing in for the 1S2473s that are splattered throughout.
The original never quite fully opened the VCF so I’ve added a single opamp to optionally boost the level from 6v to 10v.
Here’s a video of the envelope in action – I left the text on there to keep the camera from trying to going apeshit trying to autofocus on the trace. Not being a storage oscilloscope makes it trickier to track slow moving signals but you get the idea.
In this test I’m using a 3.3uF tantalum for the timing capacitor as standard but smaller pots than the original: 500k for the attack, 100k for the decay (which is too small, really), and 500k for the release, all audio taper. At about 0:43 the sustain pot is turned to 100% which causes the voltage to ramp up slightly rather than staying level. I’ve not looked very hard into fixing this – I’ve just been turning it up to just below maximum.
Here’s the layout and the DIY LC file (without the 6v to 10v boost) should you feel in the mood to torture yourself with some stripboarding.
Having been through all that, if you want tight and snappy then the 100m envelope is probably a better bet.
Due to other things (work, house move, more work…) the System 700 envelope PCBs I made have been left untouched in a box since March, I’m looking forward to getting those going and comparing them to the System 100 and 100m… eventually.
Continuing my suddenly obsessive System 100 stripboarding with a boring bit, the voltage controlled amplifier.
I wasn’t expecting this to be amazing sounding, being not much more than a CA3080, but I thought it was worth a go as I’m trying to replicate the original as far as I can.
Here’s the original VCA, with the blue marking on the 3080 presumably to show that it has been selected for low CV feed-through. I’ve seen circuits for matching OTAs, but I’m not clear how best to select for low CV bleed. Maybe it’s just a case of trying a bunch of 3080s to see which is the least clicky.
I wanted to keep the mix input from the 102, so I built the thing around Q337. Also not having a TA7136 SIP opamp to hand, I just subbed in the usual (non-inverting) TL072-based CGS DC mixer on the end, which was a mistake.
As I understand it now, the System 100 VCF inverts the signal from the VCO, and the VCA inverts it again, so it’s all back the right way up. As it stands, my layout inverts it twice, so input to the VCF eventually ends up inverted.
Incidentally I can’t imagine the TA7136 will make much difference, but now I’ve just had some arrive in the post, I’ll build a version with it.
To give an idea of my general confusion, I spent an evening wondering why the output from the VCF was crazily offset by a number of volts, before realising that this would be sorted out by the capacitor C324, which is on the VCA board. Just because it seems all nice and modularised doesn’t mean that it is.
Here’s a demo with the envelope on the System 100 101 keyboard modulating the VCA cutoff.
It gets clicky like my SH-5 with the envelope on a short release and the filter cutoff low, it might be that I need to find a better 3080.
One mod that might be interesting is to boost the input to the VCA from the VCF to see how it overdrives. Maybe messing with R378 on the input to the CA3080 might do the trick.
Here’s a stripboard layout for the inverting version using a TL071, any corrections or improvements joyfully received in the comments below, taaaa.
Update 9th Feb 2023: Corrected capacitance values on decoupling capacitors on IC305 (C325 and C326) from 100nF to 10nF – thanks Mike in the comments below.
I’ve read loads on the various forums about fat, vintage-y sounding voltage controlled oscillators. What is the secret? ask the people with too much time on their hands. “Let’s measure it” say some. “There’s some undefinable mojo” say others.
Does the System 100 VCO sound vintage and fat? What does that mean anyway?
Enough of all that, here’s a schematic.
My System 100 sounds generally lovely. The oscillator sounds slightly different to my Analogue Systems RS-95 oscillators, apparently itself a “vintage-y” sounding oscillator. I’d prefer to quantify such woolly terms with measurements, but when I started building this, I lacked test equipment beyond my laptop/audio interface inputs and a really cheap DSO Nano oscilloscope. Which actually turned out to be a problem.
(It must be vintage – it’s brown and the opamps are in cans).
‘Cos it’s bigger than the things I’ve stripboarded so far – and I couldn’t get it to work on a breadboard – I was super-careful about laying it all out and checking for shorts before plugging it in.
The expo converter at the heart of the System 100 oscillator uses this…
…the Fairchild uA726 heated matched transistor pair. It was apparently always quite costly, and has been officially out of production for a long time, which means that it’s even more expensive and harder to get hold of.
There are other ways to skin the expo converter cat, but I’d hoped to stick with the uA726. Mainly because it’s easy, it’s what the System 100 had, and I didn’t think I was clever enough to work out how to adapt the circuit for a tempco or a heated CA3046 (like on the Curetronic version of the 100m VCO). Also I fretted about the possible power draw of a heating up a 3046 to working temperature.
All this hand-wringing lead me to searching eBay, where a seller in Hong Kong was offering a pair for fifteen quid with a no-questions-asked refund policy.
With my usual timing, I read all the comments in the analogue-heaven archives about dodgy uA726s after I’d clicked buy-it-now, so it seemed quite likely I’d ordered a pair of fakes.
Here’s one of them – they’re outwardly identical.
Before I plugged the uA726 in, I bunged in a matched pair of BC547 with no temperature compensation just for testing the circuit.
Here’s the arrangement I used for testing, with a 10 pin DIP socket in the uA726 position.
I used some electrical tape just to stop the legs of the left hand transistor from touching.
I flipped the switch, the power supply lights glowed happily, and the VCO made some sounds like it was trying to oscillate, but not quite managing it. When waggling the pitch knob it would cut out, and then distort and glitch out in a mad FM sort-of way. This is as good as I got it.
After a lot of head scratching, on a whim I swapped the comparator CA3130 at IC205 for a CA3140, which made it oscillate without glitching. With the BC547 matched pair in place, the pitch drifted in a comical way.
On installing the 726, it warmed up nicely and the oscillator tracked reasonably. I’ve still got some fiddling to do to see if I can get it tracking as well as the oscillator in the 101 keyboard.
Although the CA3140 worked, it didn’t seem quite right. On taking tuning measurements, I found that the pulse width increased with the pitch, from 50.3% at C1 to 51.3% at C6. I measured the pulse width on my System 100, and that stayed steady up the octaves.
I checked my photographs of the 101 keyboard, and there really are two CA3130s there – here they are in the bottom left corner of the shot – so there must be something else going on.
Boringly I spent a couple of months (no really…) to get the CA3130 working with no luck. I looked at the SH-5 for inspiration and tried a bunch of different things, including swapping the CA3130s, checking the value of R227, using original 1S2473 diodes, and checked all the voltages, but nothing worked.
Then I started having a look at the VCOs from the Rolands from around the same time and found an indication of the length of the reset pulse in the SH-1 service manual, again with using a small picofarad capacitor on the integator feedback:
Slinging in a 10pF capacitor across pin 3 and 6 of IC205 made it work. I was so glad, it was pathetic.
About this time I finally got a decent oscilloscope (which would’ve really helped with tracking down the problem), so here’s a video of the reset pulse with extra cap, dancing about like a four year old at a wedding after too many sweets:
And here it is with a 10pF capacitor on the integrator feedback, just a picture because it stays still. Although the trace glows brighter as the pitch goes higher.
3µs is a bit long, so trying again with a 5pF capacitor we get:
which seems pretty close to the SH-1 spec. Going smaller with a 2.2pF capacitor it still resets happily with a pulse length of 1.3µs, and it’ll probably go lower than that.
I’m still interested to know why it didn’t work the first time round, or even more how my 101 keyboard works at all.
I note that the SH-5 and the System 100 have a similar arrangement of diode + resistor round the integrator, but most of the Roland VCO cores that come after use a low picofarad capacitor. Reading the 1S2473 datasheet, it seems like there would be some inherent capacitance there, maybe it’s not quite enough in this case to keep it cleanly resetting.
I made a more basic mistake when comparing the DIY VCO frequency with my System 100, wondering why it was wobbling around like that. Looking at it on the oscilloscope I could see the square wave flexing in and out in a suspiciously 50Hz-ish kind of way. I realised that stringing a long wire across the room to my (switched off) MC-4 for pitch CV was a bad idea – turning it on or removing the wire mostly fixed it, with the rest of the wobbliness coming from the unshielded pitch offset wire coming from a pot on a breadboard.
While researching pitch wobbliness, I stumbled across a post in the AH archives: Ritchie Burnett did some testing on analogue synths to check for oscillator pitch drifting, and found that the VCO in his SH-09 was modulated by interference from the nearby mains power cables. There are some power lines routed directly underneath my table which probably don’t help, so I’ve placed a grounded metal place underneath the circuit board in the hope that’ll cut down on the interference.
The voltage levels are close enough to the original, and the waveforms all look pretty similar, apart from the triangle which suffers from a much larger reset glitch, presumably from the capacitor I’ve added for lengthening the reset pulse.
Here are some octaves of C, all taken through the filter fully open, then through my version of the VCA, which unfortunately inverts at the moment. Not ideal but you get the idea. Warning – the tuning isn’t perfect… Saw:
Hello square:
And a triangle – the glitch makes it fuzzier than it should be:
And some random PWM fiddling:
The scaling measures as ok until it gets to the sixth octave where it goes sharp. Adjusting the scale has sort-of minimised it, but I’m wondering if increasing R224 (resistor in the integrator feedback loop) to the SH-5 standard of 3.3K or adding a trimmer here might help – I note there’s one on the SH-2 at this point which controls “linearity”. Starting off from C0 isn’t terribly realistic so it’s not as bad as it might seem.
The high notes don’t quite sound as pure as the original System 100, which I’m putting down to a 50Hz modulation being picked up from the mess of cables on my desk.
I had a quick go at just comparing a couple of loops from the original and from my clone. Here’s the original, sequenced from the MC-4 with resonance set about half-way:
and here’s the clone
And the original with a bit more resonance
and the clone
The pot positions are different on both, partly because some of the pot values are different on the clone (lower resistance pots = more control over the snappy area, especially on decay) but also some of the rotary pots on the clone don’t have any knobs on yet.
Despite having left both on for half-an-hour before I started this, the clone had drifted upwards slightly inbetween takes, which wasn’t too great.
This thing has been sitting on my desk for over a year now while I fret about sliders vs. rotary pots for a front panel for my 102 clone, and I’ve changed my mind about the uA726. Initially I thought it was a real one but it seems unlikely that they are exact clones given how expensive it would be to start making such a component again, so I wonder how it came to be. At the very least it’s some similar arrangement of transistors shoved into a can with a possibly dodgy heater circuit.
Now I’ve got a bit more confident with changing circuits, I’m leaning more towards remaking it with a heated CA3046 (looking at the Doepfer A110 for inspiration, see below for the relevant part of the schematic), or an LS318 matched NPN pair with a tempco.
But anyway, here’s the stripboard layout, and rather more helpfully here’s the DIYLC file in the rare case that you are masochistic enough to want to build this and you’ve somehow happened upon a bunch of cheap uA726.
If you find anything wrong with it or if you know why my oscillator needs the extra capacitor to stretch the reset pulse out I’d love to know.
