And yet, they’re fast enough to do everything the DN does, and do it well. I’m obviously someone that loves knowing what’s inside… pretty much anything, but what’s more interesting is how it’s used than what it actually is. The fact that they’re getting the quality of audio and the functionality they are in a small box, for what is actually a pretty reasonable price is pretty cool. And yes, as far as general purpose MCUs go that IS pretty fast. It may not be the latest ARM based design, and it may not be Sharc+Black Fin, but they’re hardly slow ICs.
There’s another way to look at this. Since the SID Station, Elektron have been using Motorola (now Freescale / NXP) ICs. I believe the SID Station ran on an HC11 for the OS and additional functionality external to the SID chip. There is something to be said for using the ICs and architectures that you have experience with, and squeezing every last bit of performance out of it, than just jumping on something bigger, and starting over again.
It kind of reminds me of the era where PCs were just getting to be good at fast action type games. You’ve got coders that knew the 3.5MHz 65816 in the SNES coding in assembly, and creating amazing games with cool effects. Then you have coders coding in mostly C (maybe a little assembly) on a 40MHz 386, which should have been able to wipe the floor with the SNES. It wasn’t until id Software came along with Wolfenstein and Doom that the PC started pulling ahead of those 16 bit consoles.
Maybe not the perfect analogy, but it’s what springs to my mind. Who knows, maybe Elekton’s next devices will be jam packed with top end DSPs, multi-core ARM processors, and ESS DACs. That would require a lot of learning, maybe more hiring, higher costs, and ultimately higher prices. Maybe it would be worth it, maybe it wouldn’t.
All I know is that the Digitone is the most inspiring, fun to use, best sounding digital synth I’ve touched in years, and excels at what it does. It could be bigger. It could use more expensive processors. It could do things the likes of which none of us has ever seen, but that’s not what it is. It’s exactly what it is, what it was designed to be, and it doesn’t seem like they can even keep enough of them in stock for demand. They must have done something right.