I was going to find someplace to put this but this is innovative enough to pull down its own thread.
An important part of this is the multi-multi band radio receiver, that has an LFO controllable tuner, that appears (?) to go into audio rates. This is a glitchy noise machine — sample me.
Hmm… Honestly from that teaser video I don’t think it’s for me. I love the concept but what I feel it needs is a record buffer for mangling radio sounds so they repeat, rather than endlessly changing because y’know, it’s a radio.
Also, you can do all of that and a lot more with the Octatrack.
Someone should wire a OB-4 into it somehow. That is if they’re willing to teardown their $600 boutique radio
Seriously though if they somehow combined the OB-4 record buffers and expand on their looper with this thing it would be something to look at for sure. Will need to see what else it can do besides annoy me with stupid tiktok robot voice.
A little off-topic but there’s a VST called Radio by Plugin Boutique which is absolutely wonderful - it can access thousands of radio stations and allows you to save samples super easy. I’ve used it to come up with some really interesting stuff that I’d never have found by digging the crates.
The issues with having a radio on a hardware device became apparent to me when using the Polyend Tracker. It struggled to pick anything up at all. And it’s super easy to simply access a free radio app or website and pipe the audio into something with LFOs and delays.
That annoyed me too, particularly when it pronounced ‘AM’ as ‘am’.
This is pretty interesting to me. There’s no way I’ll drop serious money on one but that’s more about me than the product.
I’ve enjoyed modding and circuit bending radios since I was a kid, it felt kind of magical when I was little. I’ve never tried controlling the tuning with an lfo though, I might have to try that.
I sometimes use the old cevin key/ ken marshal trick of triggering radio snippets with drums through gate key channels. This thing would be fun for that.
I’ll keep an eye on this but more for inspiration than anything else.
When you tune an FM radio between stations, the static generates a good white noise signal. That with a crazier setting on the LFO going to the filter and some resonance might be interesting depending on the qualities of the filter and LFO.
I also am guessing the tuner sweeps linearly, as opposed to steps, like with digital FM tuners, which tune to the 0.2 Mhz steps, to exact frequencies that FM stations are assigned by the government. That would allow you to tune between stations and create intermodulation distortion and mixing.
I don’t see a bandwidth control, that would allow you to do other radio affects.
It’s not been said what the bands are, but a VLF ( very low frequency ) band with enough bandwidth to cover the audio frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum, so you could pick up whistlers, and dawn chorus, and such would be fun. Probably not but would be great if there.
The other thing obviously is to set up your own low power transmitters, both FM and AM xmitters are cheap, and you could create signals to add interest.
There are some amazing noises that gets xmitted in shortwave, like especially the spy stations, whether it be the number stations, or “the buzzer”. Actually naturally occurring distortion in short wave is often interesting.
Unfortunately it looks like the LFO > Tuner is only within one band. To bad you can’t lock in frequencies and bands like on a push button radio, and just scan across those.
It does look like there is a connector to the antenna though, to change it.
749 € on IGG.
The delay/looper is amazing, wow.
Multiband is awesome, I would be out of luck if it only picked up local FM (which is 95% trash in my country).
Haven’t listened to a radio for decades, really don’t know what’s going on with it.
