#170

Glad you like it! There’s nothing clever in there, just lots of envelope time and curve tweaking with a bit of noise.

5 Likes
#171

The whole click discussion seems a bit weird to me. Think of a constant 5V voltage going into a VCA that’s closed. If you now yank open the VCA, your output is going to immediately jump from 0V to 5V as fast as your VCA permits. That’s a short impulse which you will hear as a click. Basically every VCA or LPG clicks if you send in low frequency content and then yank it open. The only things you can do against that is either to make the attack of your envelope (or the slewing of the “strike” input) slow enough to create a curve that doesn’t click anymore (but will be much less useful for percussive sounds in general) or make the whole thing digital with detection for zero crossings (WMD has a digital VCA that does this and as a result doesn’t click).

It’s not a design flaw, it’s pretty much just how audio works. The best you can do is a trade-off with other behavior. Unless you’re all talking about a different sort of clicking and I’m just confused.

9 Likes
#172

I often found I needed to attenuate the trigger that goes into strike (contrary to what I would have expected and been told by others)

#173

My understanding of this is that the clicks are generated from the envelope/trigger opening the VCA/LPG at a point on the waveform that isn’t a zero crossing, and thus generating some form of click because of that sudden jump in voltage(?).

Thus it’s more sensitive with ‘purer’ waveforms - those with more harmonics (sawtooth etc) tend to mask the sound.

Apparently, you can try and sync the oscillator to the envelope to fix this; I’ve never made this work successfully though.

The WMD Digital VCA (on my wish list) uses some form of sample and hold to ensure that the envelope only hits the waveform initially at that zero crossing point.

However, my expectation - incorrectly - was that a vactrol response might also work in some way, but didn’t prove correct for me with the Optomix.

Alanza - when I had the Optomix, I did try a softer trigger, this only reduced the overall volume of the output.

1 Like
#174

My note crossed with x2mirko but we are saying similar things here.

But I’d also say that my experience with the Optomix was that the clicking was much more pronounced than I would expected.

And also, the real challenge I have with this is that when you feed this sound with the click into a unsynced delay, or even a synced one, it sounds awful, and much too busy in the mix to be usable for me.

And also (apologies for going on, just feeling the effects of my first coffee this morning) this explains the satisfying nature of the pinged filter - the trigger starts the feedback, rather than opening a VCA on a waveform at a random point in its cycle.

#175

sorry, i didnt mean to make anything weird. i incorrectly assumed that, because of the nature of light/vactrols, they wouldnt open fast enough to exhibit this sort of behavior.


it looks like this video confirms that it is a not-zero-crossing sound, at least as pertains to the moddemix. i did try feeding fast envelopes into the optomix strike input last night, and it actually does sound very different and clickless. this also ties up an envelope generator where i would hope a trigger could be used.
#176

the more simple it is, the more clever it is. Hats off. I really love it!

2 Likes
#177

Fun discussion topic. I have the Dotcom VCA++ which is absolute magic as an end stage for CV panning. LPG wise, I have the Metasonix RK5 and their R51 for a VCA gate, which I pair with a DLPG as well. They’re both really cool and sound distinctive.

All of this is sent through a Pittsburgh Percussion Sequencer for each left and right channel. It’s a marvelous VCA on its own, too. There’s so many interesting modules now for this sort of thing.

Great time to be alive.

#178

When I first bought my Shared system, I thought that I could use gates on the Optomix, I discovered that that wasn’t the case, if I wanted to avoid clicks. I was also kinda bummed about using up the Maths channels as envelopes… so I bought a pair of Pico Mods as the only non MN expansions to the SS. I got two cycling or triggered envelopes, plus a pair of VCAs. Maths got to do more fun stuff. I do wish that the Pico Mod’s cycling envelopes were longer though.

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#179

while I agree with you generally speaking, the optomix manual says this about the strike input:

STRIKE IN CH. 1: Gate input striking or plucking the vactrol. Expects 8V Gate

the manual clearly implies a binary nature of the input, which in practice doesn’t really hold true does it.

1 Like
#180

for what it’s worth I don’t think this is deliberately misleading: every gate/trigger input in Eurorack is somewhat sensitive to both the amplitude of the signal as well as the slope of it, which is why having enormous cable runs for a master clock signal will lead to timing issues as the shape and amplitude of the clock warps.

1 Like
#181

well, to my understanding a trigger/gate input detects a value passing a certain threshold. sensitive yes. If you’re using an envelope effectively you’re adjusting timing. if your messing with amplitude you’re messing with getting to the HIGH state. the latter doesn’t match my experience with the strike input. the former would imply the above mentioned click being a timing issue.

but I might be wrong. happy to learn more :slight_smile:

(edit: I guess in theory and in a ideal world that holds true, but since we’re talking analog signals…)

#182

i think also that one of the reasons the optomix click irritates me is that manual makes no mention of strike input conditioning, and many of the example patches from the manual include straight triggers from maths etc. theres no mention of zero crossing problems, yet it is acknowledged as something to be “gotten rid of” (via envelopes instead of triggers) by the moddemix video. it is a surprise that i had to discover for myself.

#183

I don’t get it. The manual implies a binary nature because that’s how it’s supposed to be used.

The fact that you dislike the behavior the module exhibits when you use it as intended does not mean that it doesn’t behave properly. If you don’t like the click that striking the LPG can cause, you can use an envelope instead (which by the way you shouldn’t send into the strike input, but rather into the frequency control input). But the strike input is intended for exactly this sort of thing.

Also, note that vactrols have rather large tolerances and different optomixes behave very differently. There may well be optomixes that don’t click at all because their vactrols are slow enough.

2 Likes
#184

I don’t get it either.

where did I say that? I just chimed in to share my experience with the strike input. and that is some fine tuning on the strength of the strike signal helped me.
and it seems I misunderstood the suggestion of using envelopes instead.

I bet it boils down to analog system and

all good :v:

#185

I am wondering if the strike input on the optomix actually acts by detecting a threshold crossing?

Is there any reason to think that feeding the strike input a signal other than a gate would be harmful? I know that is not its “intended use” but in euro, using modules in ways other than intented the domain of discovery…

Is it possible that the strike input is simply acting on a different part of the circuit that the cv input similar to how the !! inputs on the qpas function?

#186

the tension that i feel around the optomix does lie in the (largely semantic) differences of acceptable, intentional, and expected behavior. waveform discontinuity distortion is rarely presented as acceptable, proper, or intended behavior outside of glitch contexts (which is not how the optomix is marketed). using the strike input as per the manuals suggestions introduces the discontinuity, but this is never mentioned in the documentation. a video was produced (albeit for another module) regarding getting rid of clicks, so i would assume that clicks are not the intended behavior.

also, from the manual:

If you seek to program extremely short sounds, clicks, pops and ticks, the
Optomix is not the best choice. What the Optomix does offer is extremely low noise and low distortion and a smooth, natural sounding circuit.

we don’t know what the intended behavior is, but this misalignment of expectation, documentation, and behavior causes a notable feature of the module to be unusable for me.

#187

I cannot find another reasonable interpretation of “the implied binary nature of the input doesn’t hold true in practice” other than that you don’t agree in some way with the result you get from using the strike input as it is intended (which is “binary”). Maybe I misunderstood something, but I can’t figure it out.

#188

i read that as referencing the notable differences that one hears when feeding the strike input a trigger vs an envelope. giving strike an envelope produces a very different, click-less response, and is never mentioned in the documentation.

1 Like
#189

That makes sense, thanks. My bad.