Behringer Model D Synth

[Open_Mike]

Some blurps about Moog becoming a cooperative, and then some info on the production of the model D:

-Moog Music Inc. is now an employee-owned company, following the vision of Dr. Moog who wanted to share the company’s financial success to its employees.

-The new employee-ownership arrangement is more than just happy news for the workers; it’s a victory for the small company, whose financial success has not always matched its cultural impact.

-Many of the employees have had to wait for overdue wages when the company was in tough financial times. Now, with the employee-ownership decision, which is essentially a solid retirement plan, the people at Moog get a financial reward that matches their personal investment in the synthesizer firm…

-Model D-

-Each one is made by hand in its factory using metal sourced from Missouri and wood from Tennessee. In fact, with the exception of a few circuit boards and hard-to-find components, every piece of every Moog synth is sourced from the USA.

-To realize the unmistakable sound of the world’s first performance synthesizer, we preserve the component placement and through-hole design of the original analog circuit boards, employing military-spec precision resistors and custom-reissued transistors to complete the circuit.

"Building a Minimoog isn’t an easy task, nor is it a quick one. Running at full capacity, the Asheville factory can create just 15 Minimoogs in a day, or 30 if it runs a night shift. It takes six people to build and test each product, a process that takes almost three days to complete. “Four people are involved in the physical mechanical construction, taking all the components and the parts and ensuring that each part individually passes our quality standards, that each part goes together correctly that everything is mechanically and physically perfect on the instrument” DeBardi says. “That process for those four people takes about five hours.”

Once the Minimoog is assembled, it’s moved to a rack where it’s plugged in and turned on for 48 hours. This allows each of the circuit board’s capacitors, resistors and LED lights to have electricity passed through them for long enough to identify any faulty components. “There are thousands of these little parts in every instrument, and if any of them are going to fail that’ll happen typically in the first 24 hours of use,” says DeBardi. “So if an LED light’s gonna burn out, it’ll happen on our rack, and we can fix it at the next step of the process as opposed to it happening two months into being in somebody’s home studio.”

After the 48-hour burn-in, the Minimoog is put through an “intense calibration process,” where the synth is taken to an isolated room and a calibration technician makes it ready to play. “A synthesizer needs to be tuned like a guitar, DeBardi says. “With a guitar, you loosen and tighten the tension on the strings to get the instrument in tune with itself. With a synthesizer you are actually loosening and tightening voltage as it passes through specific points in the instrument’s circuit. Our technicians use multimeters, oscilloscopes, strobe tuners and computer programs to visualize what’s going on in there as they do those calibrations. Once the calibrations have been done it goes through what we call a ‘final check’ of the instrument, because even if everything is correct on paper, we recognise that we’re not making a television or a toaster or something that you passively interact with.”

“This is a musical instrument that people are going to use to try and create the ideas that are in the back of their heads, so there’s a very personal relationship that the player has to the instrument, and that’s why we do our final check. We’re ensuring that the way that the instrument is interacted with is a perfect experience; our technicians are trained to know how every knob should feel, how every key should react, what every waveform should look like and sound like, so that when you are interacting with the instrument that experience is perfect every time. So those calibration technicians will actually go through and turn every knob, press every key, perform every major function that the instrument is designed to perform to ensure that they are perfect before it goes out the door.”