MOTM

I got a pleasant surprise today when I showed up for work - my Wiard
Mini-Wave and Joystick had arrived. These are the 1200 series modules in
Frac Rack format, designed to be lower cost alternatives to the
significantly more expensive 300 series. Since I can't comment on sound yet,
I'll just talk about mechanicals.

1202 Mini-Wave:
The front panel is sturdy, and seems to be about the same thickness as an
MOTM panel. The silkscreening is quite fuzzy. The pcb is mounted on small
angle brackets directly to the front panel instead of to the sturdier MOTM
style bracket. Both the led array daughterboard and the pcb use rather
unattractive round head bright finish machine screws to mount. The pots are
inexpensive open frame types that feel reasonably smooth. They are mounted
too close together for my liking (Frac format sucks!) The switch feels tight
and not as smooth as the NKKs used on MOTM. The jacks are of course 1/8". If
I wasn't planning to trash the whole panel and MOTMize it, I'd be
disappointed (mostly with the silkscreening). However, I understand that
cost containment was the major design constraint here.

The pcb is the same one used in the Wiard 300 series Waveform City module.
It's of good quality and nicely laid out, although a couple of wire wrap
jumpers appear on the back. Grant is doing a new board rev to correct this
for future runs, and I believe it will also have a larger ROM to boot. I did
not find any cut traces. The led array is connected with a ribbon cable, and
the other panel controls are connected with (somewhat disorganized) single
hookup wire (there's a good picture on the web site.) Three bare-ended power
wires are soldered to the board, ready for a connector. These are smaller
gauge than the standard MOTM power wires, and may not accept an MTA
connector without soldering. I noticed the board was populated with big
brown disc caps instead of the nice yellow box caps we are used to.

Grant was pleasant to deal with and stayed in touch during the transaction.
He was nice enough to volunteer to install a ZIF socket free of charge, so I
can swap ROMs easily.

1209 Joystick:
Not as much to say about this one. The panel has the same blurred
silkscreening. There is no pcb, just a couple of transistors mounted to the
pots, an led, a pushbutton, and a few resistors mounted to the jacks. The
joystick has open frame pots, and feels nice and smooth mechanically. It
easily stays where you leave it, even if it is mounted vertically. It has a
nice spun aluminum bat handle. I was pleased to see that the gate pushbutton
was a very good match visually for the pushbuttons I've already chosen for
my own MOTM diy projects (his had a black bezel, mine are chrome, but size
and button color are identical). Two bare ended power wires are connected.
I'll be repackaging this module also into my "performance controller box".

That's it for now, I'm eager to put them through their paces tonight.
However, the first thing I must before I can test is to replace the jacks
with 1/4" Switchcrafts.

Dave Bradley
Principal Software Engineer
Engineering Animation, Inc.
daveb@...

--- In motm@egroups.com, "Dave Bradley" <daveb@e...> wrote:
> That's it for now, I'm eager to put them through their paces 
tonight.
> However, the first thing I must before I can test is to replace the 
jacks
> with 1/4" Switchcrafts.

Well, I lied. I was too impatient to switch out the jacks, not to 
mention it's prudent to verify your module works before you carve it 
up...

I settled for soldering a MOTM power cable on, and used alligator 
clips on the input and output jacks. I didn't play with CV bank or 
wave select at all yet, just swept through them with the knobs.

I like the Mini-Wave a lot. Once I got it calibrated (more later), it 
had a nice clean sound. It had a lot of interesting sounding static 
waves, some good sounding wave bank sweeps, the vocal formants were 
pretty nice, and the quantizer bank is awesome. Sweep it up and down 
with a triangle wave and vary the wave number, and you've got a fun 
arpeggiator. I'll probably buy a second one as well.

OK, so to get the best performance out of this system you've got to 
calibrate it. The input waveform needs to be precisely -5V to +5V to 
play all the samples in any given wavetable. I found my 300s to have 
slightly less amplitude than that. I trimmed the Wiard's input gain 
and offset and watched the output on a scope to get a good clean sine 
wave output (using a sine wave sample, natch). You could do the same 
2 trims by ear, since you can easily hear when the sine distortion is 
at a minimum. I also found that using my 320 was not optimal after I 
had the Mini-Wave calibrated to the 300s, which were pretty 
consistant with each other. So I may look into some precision 
resistors around the 300 VCO and 320 LFO waveshaper circuits, to get 
exactly 10V peak to peak outputs for all modules which might drive a 
Mini-Wave.

All for now,

Moe