Comment by bondarchuk

Comment by bondarchuk a day ago

7 replies

>It's a nice dream, of a synthesizer where any knob can be pulled out and replaced with a patch cable, and any jack can have a knob plugged into it to set it to a fixed value.

What's even better, though, is a coupled knob + jack where the knob turns into an attenuator for the input when a cable is plugged in, and works as a standalone knob otherwise. I think this is quite a common design.

I believe I've also seen patch cables with built-in attenuators.

kennywinker a day ago

Another common pattern is jack + offset. The most useful is when you have jack + offset + attenuator… but most modules pick one or the other for space reasons.

  • robotresearcher a day ago

    The attenuator-inverter is super handy too. A gain knob that goes from -1 to +1 X.

    • wbl 2 hours ago

      That's a neat trick. Only way I can think of to do it involves two op amp buffers, one inverting one not and take the signal from the wiper.

  • BlandDuck a day ago

    Totally. Also, an attenuator is easier and cheaper to implement, because it just requires normalizing V+ into the jack plug. An offset requires an adder.

    My preference is: attenuator < offset < attenuator + offset. I see no benefit of having to remove the knob to get to the jack as proposed in the article.

    • nine_k a day ago

      The benefit is saving space. Imagine a 10x10 grid of such jack / knob inputs.

malthaus a day ago

the smartest pattern is used in mutable instruments beads, the "attenurandomizers"

it packs a ridiculous amount of functionality into a single plug & knob combo