MOTM

--- In motm@y..., revtor@a... wrote:
> Guys, here's a great Emu modular link..lots of info and nice pics.  
> Some neat module features and some surprising similarities with 
> MOTM.  (Surprise or coincidence Paul..?? : )

I found this site a year or more ago. I'm disappointed to see that he 
hasn't added any of the pics he's missing since then. I still have my 
Dec. '78 Emu technical catalog, which is the source for all that 
site's pics and text.

Emu was a class outfit all the way. They had the finest user 
interface I've ever seen, bar none. Their component selection, the 
mechanical construction, and the designs were top notch - head and 
shoulders above anything else available at the time. It was expensive 
as hell, but Dave and Scott would sell you the essential circuits as 
potted submodules for WAY cheaper, which allowed me to build my first 
synth in '73. The only electronics experience I previously had was 
working on Hammonds, but Dave introduced me to the mysteries of 
summing node opamps over the phone - talk about tech support!

Hmmm - finest parts, great design and tech support - yep, that sounds 
like the MOTM philosophy all right.

The only complaints I've ever heard leveled against the Emu modular 
was that the sound was "too clean", and that it was so damn big. 
Well, it didn't sound like a Moog, but I always loved the sound of 
mine. The size resulted from their philosophy of input and output 
mixers on each module, and you sure didn't care about the large size 
when you found that patching it was a dream.

Are there echos of Emu modules in MOTM design? Well, I hope so. In 
the early days of this list, we debated user interface design of 
various modules much more avidly than we tend to now. I'm sure I made 
people weary extolling the features on the Emu version of this module 
or that. The lag processor is an example of an Emu influenced module 
(features not design), but with an extra MOTM twist. If you look at 
my SuperMoe sequencer designs, they are heavily influenced by the 
modular Emu sequencer approach. It's unfortunate that the site 
doesn't have pics of the sequencer modules up.

Moe