I believe I had that at 100% CW, fully saturated. I’ll be back at my rack on Monday to test but the levels just seemed very off to me with my last patch…

Earlier in the week I was really pushing the unit hard with fast, irregular clocks making some fantastic glitched sounds, but now i’m beginning to get concerned that something tweaked the Wet channel… I just have no idea if that’s possible. I’ll keep experimenting…

I had a Magneto and I have a Mimeophone now, and I think the Mimeophone is much more interesting of a module. I think the Make Noise one inspires experimentation and the Strymon doesn’t, but I think it shows in their respective pedigrees of what they are good at.

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Definitely inspires experimentation in me! A sound-on-sound tape looper that I can sync to MIDI and melodically play the delay line in key - well, that’s an instrument I’ve been dreaming about for years. Of course if you’re just looking for a delay it’s completely overkill, and I will eventually end up with a Mimeophone as well because it’s got a pretty different take on a similar idea.

Expanding on my earlier post about syncing the looper - I’m now using an Octatrack instead of Ableton, but similar method. Here’s a sample, setup was just Octatrack, OP-1, and FH-2.

3 elements in total.
1 - drum loop from the OT
2 - I used an OT MIDI track to send a trigger into the tap jack to set a 2 bar loop (see above post). I played the OP-1 into Magneto and manipulated the loop extensively with the Magneto’s controls. After a few minutes I had something cool, unrecognizable from the source, in sync rhythmically, and in the right key. I recorded it back into the OT and triggered it as a loop - this is the chord followed by two filtery hits.
3 - this one is the gliding live track on top. Again, set the loop length on Magneto and recorded more OP-1 in. I input a bunch of notes in into the OP-1’s Tombola sequencer, and patched the output into Magneto pitch in. I remember hitting shift and reverse manually, maybe gate went into something too?

I will note it also went to some pretty gnarly and wild places en route to this, I just prefer making melodious and rhythmic synced stuff. Magneto can easily get very Out There.

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So after almost a year with Magneto found something really exciting for me.
When in Red looper mode by default Magneto engages hold control for the loop to be stored and available to be played via Play button/CV. But if you disengage it i the continuosly records to the buffer but plays back only when Play is engaged.

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Any Frapp Tools Plus case owners bought a Strymon Magneto yet? Does it fit?

It’s quoted as having a depth of 41mm, making it shallower than the 45mm Xaoc Batumi which was a tight fit but (grudgingly) went in my Plus case, but it looks HUGE in pictures. @AlessandroBonino ? @David_Rothbaum ?

Looking at the measures it should fit. But I won’t buy it. It looks like it was engineered by someone that has never seen an eurorack module.

(pic found on facebook a couple of weeks ago, but I don’t remember the original poster, sorry)

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What in the WORLD…?

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What my nightmares are made of

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i’m no engineer but that looks more like a bomb than a delay module

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Mm. It certainly is a spectacularly unattractive module. :confused: But I’ve been pretty impressed by the noises it makes, and so I’m hoping I can get over that.

It’s not that it’s unattractive, but it has so many possible points of failure that it makes me cry.

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Ohmygoodness. Someone send Strymon a bag of thonkiconn jacks ASAP! :sweat_smile:

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I held off on Magneto for exactly this reason; my main skiff only barely fit the Batumi, and my other bits are in a Frap Plus. Right now, Clouds and a physical tape delay (Klemt Echolette) through the ALM SBG are doing fine enough work.

I just wish the jacks were all along the bottom, rather than distributed around the edges of the module.

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As I don’t have the module in my hands, it is difficult for me to understand exactly what’s problematic with its construction.

Would you care to explain ? I’m very much interested about these considerations.

:man_technologist: :man_scientist:

The Frapp Tools Case is pretty shallow, so my primary concern is whether there’s enough depth in the case for this module.

There would be no problems if this was a pedal, with a metal enclosure. But this is a module with an open back, and is meant to be moved from the studio case to the live case, and then back to the studio case, etc… For example, those exposed thin flat cables are a recipe for disaster, if you ask me. They might not fail today, but maybe tomorrow…

The bulkiness and overall strange modular integration is why I’m probably not going to pick up a Magneto, despite loving my El Capistan. It’s very clear they don’t fully understand the format because I find the choice of CV integration a bit odd on that module, and with a lot of things lacking. (no CV control over any of the sound-shaping parameters, a large chunk of the outputs dedicated to clock outputs from each head…why would I want that?) Also the lack of independent dual-channel operation like the DLD means for 28hp I’m always stuck with just one delay which doesn’t fit the bill for my smallish system. And lastly, I think it sounds great, but I’m already hearing a lot of the same sounds from it - maybe it’s just early days and people haven’t unearthed it’s full potential, but I can definitely see it’s sexiness wearing off on me rather quickly.

Not going to jump to conclusions on performance or reliability yet because Strymon has a very strong track record on the pedal front (IMO anyways), but dang that thing looks like a house of cards. I do agree with others that indicate that this thing kind of goes against some general design principals in eurorack - you are pretty much guaranteed to have cables crossing the main interface at all times and I see a toroidal transformer (?) on the back for I guess some crazy power filtering/conditioning. I’ve not seen the need for that before - my case PSU is pretty well filtered but maybe they see the need for more.

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Regarding the transformer, there was a comment from one of the engineers:

The Sharc processor used in the Magneto requires a lot of current at a low voltage (3.3V/1.2V core). Rather than drawing all of this current from a single supply, we use a custom multitiap flyback transformer to split the power draw between the +12V and -12V supplies. The primary for our flyback converter is the 24V potential formed by stacking the +/-12V supplies. The secondaries are +3.3V, +15V, -15V. The +/-15V are subsequently filtered and linearly-regulated to provide +/- 12V rails for our analog circuitry.

In addition to distributing the power draw, this scheme has a couple benefits for the audio performance.

  1. The output windings of the the transformer are galvanically isolated from each other and from the primary. This allows us to carefully manage analog and digital grounds, preventing the digital portion of this design from bleeding into our low noise analog circuitry. Isolation from the Eurorack power supply ground also provides immunity from system noise.

  2. Because we generate our own analog rails, we are also immune from noise on the +/-12V Eurorack supplies.

It does sound like things were thought through

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