Demystifying the Dsynth and Dbox engines

Gambler · March 18, 2018, 4:43pm

While searching for a hh sound on dbox It felt like the env Page also affects the synth engine. More than just an effect on the amplitude of a sound. Anyone else discovered that?

DBox or DSyth? DBox uses that weird drum envelope that does compression and distortion, so it definitely does change timbre. As far as DSynth, I haven't noticed anything. The only engine that for sure reacts to envelope is Iter. There is a certain phase of it that only kicks in during decay. Having 0-decay drastically alters sound there.

mathelev · March 19, 2018, 8:45am

Cheers everyone! I hope someone with a lot of patience and an oscilloscope manages to solve some of these mysteries ;)

@raigan more praise to you. Awesome speculation on the mysterious D-beasts, and thanks for your OP-1 analysis blog.

dinraum · March 27, 2018, 2:54pm

While searching for a hh sound on dbox It felt like the env Page also affects the synth engine. More than just an effect on the amplitude of a sound. Anyone else discovered that?
DBox or DSyth? DBox uses that weird drum envelope that does compression and distortion, so it definitely does change timbre. As far as DSynth, I haven’t noticed anything. The only engine that for sure reacts to envelope is Iter. There is a certain phase of it that only kicks in during decay. Having 0-decay drastically alters sound there.
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With dbox and that weird drum env I didn’t understand it changed the sound more than I expected. Didn’t know about the iter.

winerz · March 27, 2018, 7:31pm

Ok, so DSYNTH turns out to be a bona fide a.m. / f.m. style snarling beast, not just an annoying random thing!

raigan · March 27, 2018, 8:36pm

Cheers @<a href=“https://operator-1.com/index.php?p=/profile/1512/mathelev” class=“Username” style=“margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-weight: bold; font-size: 15px; font-family: “lucida grande”, “Lucida Sans Unicode”, tahoma, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration-line: none; color: rgb(1, 115, 198); background-color: rgb(252, 252, 255);”>mathelev I want to write some new stuff because I think I made a lot of mistakes

@dinraum: I think it makes sense that the envelopes affect the timbre of the sound – if I’m right and sometimes osc2 is modulating osc1, then an envelope which changes osc2’s amplitude will end up also changing the strength/amount of modulation applied to osc1, which in turn will change the timbre. If I’m right then it’s more or less analogous to the Blue parameter of the FM synth engine. The part that makes it hard to understand is that “Mode” seems to do lots of different stuff simultaneously, so that the envs are only sometimes affecting timbre and other times just volume (or maybe they’re always affecting both in varying amounts).

@winerz: yeah! I’ve definitely noticed regions that sounded AM and FM… what I really want to know is what’s going on for the regions that don’t sound like either of those types of modulation; Mode seems to be changing a lot of stuff (maybe: mix level between osc1 / osc2 / osc1-x-osc2, as well as the type and amount of modulation (and maybe direction of modulation too? i.e maybe sometimes osc1 is modulating osc2 instead of the other way around)).

I do think it would be an awesome project to try to map exactly what Mode is doing at various values, sadly I don’t have time to do it myself at the moment… alas

winerz · March 28, 2018, 6:50am

Yeah definitely some X mod going on

hermbot · March 28, 2018, 9:00pm

I’m glad to see that it’s not just me that gets flummoxed by this mode. I agree that the included oscilloscope is pretty uninformative. I think with some time in front of a scope and spectrum analyzer we could collectively make a dent in this module…