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You Can’t Build a Roland TR-808 Because You Don’t Have Faulty Transistors

posted by martyb on Friday September 14 2018, @08:16AM   Printer-friendly
from the a-feature-is-something-that-is-broken-in-a-useful-way dept.

MrPlow writes in with a submission (via IRC) for TheMightyBuzzard:

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.

Source: https://hackaday.com/2018/09/06/you-cant-build-a-roland-tr-808-because-you-dont-have-faulty-transistors/

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by choose another one on Friday September 14 2018, @04:45PM (3 children)

    by choose another one (515) Subscriber Badge on Friday September 14 2018, @04:45PM (#734894)

    If you RTFA and follow the link to secret life of synthesizers, it appears that is what Roland did in the TR-08 to good effect.

    A more accurate headline would be "you can't build an analogue Roland TR-808 because..."

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 14 2018, @06:21PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 14 2018, @06:21PM (#734944)

    http://grammarist.com/spelling/analog-analogue/ [grammarist.com]

    • (Score: 1) by DrXenos on Saturday September 15 2018, @03:42AM

      by DrXenos (5818) on Saturday September 15 2018, @03:42AM (#735206)

      His use of the word analogue is correct. So, what is your point?

  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday September 15 2018, @07:40AM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Saturday September 15 2018, @07:40AM (#735230) Journal

    Did Roland ever release a digital machine under the name TR-808? If not, the “analogue” is redundant.

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.