[sdiy] Doepfer (was: First synth to build? PC power supplyunit)

[Ingo Debus]

TooManySynths wrote:
> My perception of Dopfer is that they came into play to
> fill a market niche of providing low cost modular
> synths.

You mean when they introduced the A100 modular synth? No, Doepfer
started much earlier, in the early 80s, when the Curtis chips came out.
Doepfer was even the exclusive distributor for Curtis chips in Germany
(later they seeked desperately for 3340s for their VCO modules...).

In the beginning Doepfer was a very DIY-friendly company. They sold
mostly kits, but optionally one could get everything separately, PCBs,
pre-programmed EPROMs, special parts, manuals with building instructions
and schemos, whatever. The kits were so cheap that it wasn't worth the
effort just to buy the special parts from D and get the standard parts
elsewhere.  
Back then I bought five "Voice Card" kits and a multichannel
A/D-Converter kit and built my polyphonic synth with these. Ok, the
designs weren't perfect (trimpots everywhere on the PCB instead of
being at one edge, a single turn trimpot for the whole VCF frequency
range), but if I had done it all myself back then, it would have become
certainly worse.

Later D stopped selling kits. They said the support was too much effort
or something like this.

Ingo