NAMM 2018: Doepfer Simplifies The Polyphonic Workflow In Eurorack With A Range Of New Modules

February 3, 2018 Synth Anatomy Eurorack, Hardware 0

Polyphonic patches are still not the easiest challenge in the Eurorack world. You need multiple oscillators, filters, envelopes… modules to create a poly patch. To simply this workflow, Dieter Doepfer launched on this year’s NAMM show a new range of Eurorack modules specially designed for polyphonic patch designs.

New Modules For NAMM 2018

A-190-5 Polyphonic CV/Gate Interface: It’s a Midi/USB interface that generates 4 gate signals and 12 control voltages to control up to four synthesizer voices (i.e. VCOs and associated modules like envelope generators, VCFs and VCAs) for polyphonic sound generation. The A-190-5 will be equipped with different polyphonic, duophonic, paraphonic and monophonic modes which are selected by means of menu buttons and the display. For each channel a gate, a note controlled CV (1V/Oct.) and two auxiliary CVs (e.g. for velocity or controlled by midi control change messages) are available. In play mode the states of the four gates are displayed by four LEDs integrated into the buttons 1-4. Firmware updates are possible via USB.

A-111-4 Quad VCO: The A-111-4 contains four precision VCOs with 10 octaves range and has individual controls, inputs and outputs for each VCO available as well as common controls and outputs.

A-105-4 Quad SSM VCF: It’s our first polyphonic filter and contains four identical 24dB Lowpass filters (SSM2044 type). It has available common manual controls and CV inputs with attenuators for these parameters:

A-132-8 Octal VCA: It contains four VCA pairs. Each pair includes two daisy-chained VCAs. One VCA has a linear control scale, for the second VCA linear or exponential control scale can be chosen by means of jumpers. We decided to provide two VCAs for each voice because usually one VCA is required for loudness envelope and a second one for velocity (or another function).

A-141-4 Quad VCADSR: A-141-4 contains four ADSR type voltage controlled envelope generators with common manual controls and CV inputs with polarizers for the parameters Attack (A), Decay (D), Sustain (S) and Release (R). Each of the four envelope generators has available a gate input, a control LED and an envelope output.