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from the a-feature-is-something-that-is-broken-in-a-useful-way dept.
That headline sounds suspect, but it is the most succinct way to explain why the Roland TR-808 drum machine has a very distinct, and difficult to replicate noise circuit. The drum machine was borne of a hack. As the Secret Life of Synthesizers explains, it was a rejected part picked up and characterized by Roland which delivers this unique auditory thumbprint.
Pictured above is the 2SC828-R, and you can still get this part. But it won't function the same as the parts found in the original 808. The little dab of paint on the top of the transistor indicates that it was a very special subset of those rejected parts (the 2SC828-RNZ). A big batch of rejects were sold to Roland back in the 1970's — which they then thinned out in a mysterious testing process. What was left went into the noise circuit that gave the 808 its magical sizzle. When the parts ran out, production ended as newer processes didn't produce the same superbly flawed parts.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by dltaylor on Friday September 14 2018, @10:50AM (3 children)
"Way back when", I worked for a company whose chief engineer had a solution for the MITI (Japanese government-established design piracy organization; things are a bit different these days, I think) requirement that the complete designs for electronics imported into Japan had to be provided for "safety evaluation". He designed a piece of RTL into everything, and, since he owned ALL of the remaining RTL (TTL and CMOS had become the technologies of choice) stocks on the planet, it was difficult for anyone to produce a copy of the design.
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Friday September 14 2018, @10:53AM (1 child)
I responded to a few of these "full design for safety" demands from Korea and other areas (for relatively complex microcontroller based devices) - generally I sent back a block diagram with three to five elements and a few connecting lines on it, and it was accepted.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday September 14 2018, @04:58PM
My latest designs have SFP cages connected to FPGAs connected to processors (and supporting cast).
"sure, you can have our schematics. You might just ask the guys from Taiwan who drew them. You're all set if you want to copy our hardware."
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Friday September 14 2018, @02:10PM
Not quite that far back, at my first job as a teenager, one of my tasks was to remove the lettering from TTL chips. I always thought it was stupid, that if anyone really wanted to they could figure out what most of the chips were by the pinout (ins versus outs).