Analogue-sequencer

Folks,

I've got the factory poised to start making Cirklon cases, just as soon as I make my mind up on one. last. detail...

Is there any real value in having quarter inch or 3.5mm sockets on the Cirklon rear panel ?
The alternative is to have only a multi-pin connector, and require an external breakout box or splitter cable.

The largest number of individual sockets that could fit on the rear panel would be about 12.
With a 25-way D connector, there could be up to 16 CV outs, and 8 gates.
Or some other combination, possibly including some CV input.

If you're looking to pick up a Cirklon to integrate into an analogue setup, how would you see yourself using it ?

The most recent pre-production Cirklon has two channels of CV/gate on quarter inch sockets.
It struck me that this doesn't really offer much advantage over a MIDI to CV convertor - the worst case latency over MIDI for two notes being 2ms, which is easily compensated for.
For my own studio, my biggest timing issue was with the triggering via MIDI of my analogue percussion sounds.
The problem there is that multiple hits on the same beat are spread out by at least 0.65ms per instrument over MIDI.
The solution I came up with for that was to have Cirklon output a CV/trigger multiplex.
A simple external circuit turns that output into as many as 32 CV/gate pairs, in a fixed refresh period, with synchronised update of all the triggers, and essentially no CPU load on Cirklon, thanks to DMA.
I have a prototype of this running in my 808/909 clone (which has a mere 23 separate drum voices) and the improvement in tightness is immediately obvious.

Let me know what you think.
Preferably soon ;-)

Best regards,
Colin Fraser
Sequentix Music Systems Ltd
http://www.sequentix.com