Browsing Bugg's site earlier I saw he's got a killer noise gate board up that uses one of THAT Corp's specialized chips, and it made me wonder: Why don't we see their parts in pedal stuff more often? The 43XX series are all pretty much tailor made to be kickass gates/compressors/etc, so what gives?
Are they like using a canon to kill a mosquito, and just too much for our little six string toys to need? Are we so set in our ways of worshiping at the altar of the CA3080 that we refuse to move on? Is it something staggeringly obvious that my twitchy overcaffeinated brain is missing entirely?
The only other noisegate that I know that uses a THAT IC is the ISP Decimator, and that one seems to be copyrighted to death. It's been traced, some people have offered pcb's for it, I built at least 4 of them, but overall people seem to shy away from selling commercial pcb's for them. So maybe that's the reason? Too much of a legal minefield?
My favorite pedal that I've built is a compressor that uses a THAT 4316.
http://www.thatcorp.com/pedals/index.html
just had a look at the pedal that BuGG's pcb is based on: the Fortin Zuul
Looks to work like the decimator G String. Both use an extra input for the guitar signal that triggers the gate, while the gate itself is placed in the effectsloop to minimize the preamp noise as well, which is nice for cranked high-gain amps. The only thing here is that you need to split your signal before, there's only a trigger (ie guitar signal) input, but no output. It should be easy enough to add a buffer and signal splitter to the circuit.
I also did a 2 min patent search and came up empty for Fortin, so it looks like this is not the same situation as with the decimator. However, I found nothing matching for ISP technologies or "time vector processing" (what ISP calls their method), so my Fortin search could be worth nothing ;D
I haven't looked recently but the ubiquitous Boss CS-3 is apparently using a THAT chip for the VCA compression. The good version, the CS-2, used the obsolete BA662 if I remember correctly. These guys cloned it: http://www.openmusiclabs.com/projects/ba662-clone/index.html (http://www.openmusiclabs.com/projects/ba662-clone/index.html)
I've always wondered if there were other chip options for modernizing a CS-2 style compressor.
Quote from: JC103 on December 31, 2018, 05:24:07 PM
I haven't looked recently but the ubiquitous Boss CS-3 is apparently using a THAT chip for the VCA compression. The good version, the CS-2, used the obsolete BA662 if I remember correctly. These guys cloned it: http://www.openmusiclabs.com/projects/ba662-clone/index.html (http://www.openmusiclabs.com/projects/ba662-clone/index.html)
I've always wondered if there were other chip options for modernizing a CS-2 style compressor.
The BA662 isn't THAT different from the ubiquitous CA3080, functionality wise. Which basically is half a (much cheaper and more readily available) 13700. So in theory one could whip up a CS-2 clone with a 13700 and it would sound pretty close to a BA662'd original.
Will there be enough different to notice? Probably, but its up to the ever fickle ear of the audiophile to really decide (and good luck getting an unbiased answer out of those cork sniffers!).
That's one reason I'm so curious why we don't see THAT corp stuff in the DIY scene more often. They're custom made for audio applications, and hell their website has guitar pedal schematics posted right on the page.
I'd love to see a full-featured DIY compressor - gain reduction LED metering, attack, release, ratio, volume, and clean blend controls, relay switching.
Sounds like a P R E M I U M product that the Bean could put out as a PLR board.
Quote from: playpunk on January 01, 2019, 03:55:33 AM
I'd love to see a full-featured DIY compressor - gain reduction LED metering, attack, release, ratio, volume, and clean blend controls, relay switching.
Sounds like a P R E M I U M product that the Bean could put out as a PLR board.
I've got the LED metering part. The quality of my vid is terrible (especially the near total lack of audio ::)), but if you look carefully, you will see me demonstrate three different compression settings, with a yellow bar to indicate the instantaneous output level on a dB scale, and red bars above or green bars below to indicate by how much it is attenuating or amplifying the input to arrive at that output.
https://youtu.be/U7caRyEjSeg