Elektron Musical Instruments

Well, my TM-1 arrived yesterday.  Nice looking box, and the unit
itself is very nice looking as well, matches the MD perfectly.  I did
have the same issue a few others reported, where the manual was packed
right on top of the unit's brushed aluminum case.  As a result, the
ink from the manual rubbed off on the case.  I managed to get it off
after a lot of rubbing with some paint cleaner, but it would be nice
if Elektron addressed this by putting the manual above the foam in the
box.

Install was a piece of cake, XP detected it right away.  Just for
kicks I decided to reload OS1.32b, and was very grateful to see just
how much faster the update went.  I used C6, and got no errors during
the update.  Reloaded my 32 samples (1.70MB) into the UW portion as
well, and again, very speedy as promised.  I'd say this is something
that could be done in a live setting for people who were curious about
this aspect, takes less than a minute now.

Fired up Ableton Live 6.01, and decided to see how sync was affected,
and to compare the TM-1 in turbo mode with my other midi interfaces in
terms of timing improvements.  Syncing the MD-UW to Live 6.01 worked
fine using one of my regular drum patterns, once I had the midi offset
for the clock in Live 6.01 configured correctly.  The MD seemed to
stay in sync just fine with Live on my HP ZT3010US laptop.

Next I created a 1 bar pattern in the MD that used 16 impulses from
the GND machine.  Then I recorded 8 bars of audio while syncing the MD
to midi clock using the TM-1 (turbo engaged), the midi port on my MOTU
Ultralite, and my M-Audio Midisport 1x1.  I used separate tracks in
Live to record the audio while clocking the MD via each device.  I
also removed the offset I had originally specified when syncing via
the TM-1 int he paragraph above.  So all of the audio you see in the
screen shots below is with Live 6.01's default sync offset, IE 0.
Here's screen shots of the recorded audio at both Measure 1, and
Measure 9 to show any drift that might have occurred.  Sorry for the
large size of the images, but I wanted to preserve the detail as much
as possible.

http://tarekith.com/images/TM1ClockTestM1.jpg

http://tarekith.com/images/TM1ClockTestM9.jpg

While each device is slightly different, to be honest I couldn't say
which was 'better'.  All of the midi devices caused the audio to have
slight drifts over the duration of the recordings.  The TM-1 didn't
seem to have any less drift than the other devices either. However,
these drifts were very minute, in that you couldn't really hear them
when playing back a normal drum pattern synced to audio in Live.  Once
the MIDI offset was set correctly for each device, the MD sounded like
it was locked on no matter what midi device I used to clock the MD-UW
and play it back with pre-recorded audio.

Anyway, I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions about the claim
that sync is improved with TM-1.  Perhaps on some systems things will
improve, but for me at least, it did not seem to make much difference.
 It certainly didn't make things worse though, which is all I care
about ultimately.

Here is the Ableton Live 6.01 project file if anyone would like to
look at this more closely:

http://tarekith.com/assets/MDClockTestProject.zip  (10MB)

Hope this was helpful, and feel free to let me know if you spot any
flaws in my testing or conclusions.

-- 
Tarekith
http://www.tarekith.com

Mine's here, in Chicago.  Covered in that black {soy?} ink
that they presumably use for their UW and TM boxes, which
smudges everything that comes into contact with it.

Gah.

Anyhow, it's a loverly piece of kit, with cooler than usual
DIN-5 ports and pleasing kinaesthetics.  I'm almost hesitant
to use it, as Elektron's aluminum faces dull with use.

I've got everything in the office byt MIDI cables.  Dammit.

-- 
Yours,
Niall.
.. .  .   .    .     .       .           .             .                 .
Aleph-Null.                             A Simple Insinuation Around Silence.
http://aleph-null.net
.. .. gpg public key - http://www.aleph-null.net/niall.gpg .. ..

Got mine too on Monday, smudged as well.  No biggie.

Now I made the mistake of installing the TM-1 reg and inf files for WinXP
on my W2K machine and now I get BSOD everytime I connect it or boot up the
machine with it connected...  I haven't had a chance to fix this but I
think  I just have to uninstall the hardware instances from the Device
Manager.  Hopefully I'll get to do that tonight.


> Mine's here, in Chicago.  Covered in that black {soy?} ink
> that they presumably use for their UW and TM boxes, which
> smudges everything that comes into contact with it.
>
> Gah.
>
> Anyhow, it's a loverly piece of kit, with cooler than usual
> DIN-5 ports and pleasing kinaesthetics.  I'm almost hesitant
> to use it, as Elektron's aluminum faces dull with use.
>
> I've got everything in the office byt MIDI cables.  Dammit.
>
> --
> Yours,
> Niall.
> .. .  .   .    .     .       .           .             .                 .
> Aleph-Null.                             A Simple Insinuation Around
> Silence.
> http://aleph-null.net
> .. .. gpg public key - http://www.aleph-null.net/niall.gpg .. ..
>


/roby
//www.sweet-trip.net