Syntakt users: How stable/unstable are your Dual VCOs?

Hi,

Finally I made an exchange for a new machine with Thomann and I don’t have any more problems with the VCO.
I’m really glad I reacted in time, I encourage everyone who has the problem and can still make an exchange, to do the same.

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Good to hear. I guess each Syntakt really does come with different quality VCOs…
Which is kind of scary to think about. I wanna buy one again at some point but I really don’t want to get another one from a bad batch.

I always leave my Syntakt on for 3 days before i use it. No tuning problem so far.

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Did you try with +24 Tune ?
Mine is out of tune with that setting.

I’m afraid of having a worse one…

When I turn on my SY, the 2 sounds are perfectly tuned, at all pitches.
After an hour of use the sound starts to get warmer, more analog and it starts to go out of phase and I have to go through the calibration.
It’s quite strange, it’s exactly the opposite of what I had understood at the beginning…
If you want I will test with the +24 tune in the next few days after an hour or two, with or without calibration.
But it seems to me that after the calibration all the pitches are rather correct.
I have the impression that everyone has a machine that is a bit different from the others.
I guess it could be fixed in a future firmware… I can’t imagine that Elektron is not aware of the problem (when there is one).
I personally find it hard to use the dual VCO’s for the style I do, except for bass or a few plucks here and there.

Translated with DeepL

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I’d say mine are pretty stable, had not noticed any troubles as in real bad detuning or bad tracking. Tested and recorded a bit for your reference. All three tracks, beginning with one and then adding one at a time. High notes seem better then lower notes. At most I seem to need to up the second VCO .1 of a semitone for them to phase as little as they can. Very usable for me.

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That … just makes me want to play my Syntakt, sounds great!

To chime in on the initial question, I’ve noticed on occasion that the second oscillator needs to be “detuned to tune”, eliminating phasing similarly to above, between .10 and .20 cents, but then it tracks entirely correctly. I haven’t ever run the calibration routine, and it usually does just fine playing “Juno” (3x dual VCO tuned to play big chords, with chorus and light phaser for good measure) tuned normally.

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Even with highest notes (last octave, C6-C7, and +24 Tune setting ?
Perfectly ? :sketchy:

Same question for you. :wink:

Btw I’d also choose a lower register, seems acceptably tune till note C6, Tune +24. So it should be usable for me. Not perfect. I made a calibration, but I’m not sure to have waited enough warm up before…
I’ll do it again with recordings. I reloaded OG settings since, no big change afaik.

checked the higher register at +24… watch your ears… it’s normalized

so yeah it gets worse significantly from a certain point, have no clue about the octave i was in, but it’s the very uppermost octave and then even the second half of that octave.

nonetheless very usable for me, no complaints whatsoever

Thanks. Apparently same behavior for me. @Groundman, same for you ?
No need to send back my ST ? :content:

Ogh gosh!

Sounds like it’s worse than with my old 70s / 80s monsters, whose are mostly ok thru all the range… even with 3 or 4 oscs playing together…

How is it possible with a brand new thing?

These circuits come from Rytm, made for drums. I’m not that surprised highest notes aren’t well tuned. The question is does it worth send back your Syntakt if it’s not perfectly tuned ?

Btw I just made a calibration, didn’t change much concerning highest notes apparently. Seemed to have improved osc2 relative tuning…

I’ll deal with it…

agh I see… since it made for drums…

but at the same time it would be better to advertise it as “analog drum voice with limited pitch tracking capabilities” rather than “Dual VCO synth”.

honestly it’s not the only modern analog synth which has issues. I experienced same with Medusa, it worked a bit better after calibration but not really long, need to calib each new session.

at the same time all Dave Smith instruments are rock solid with tracking. He really knew what he did.

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test of the dual VCO’s, 10 min after start-up :
TUNE 24 octave 1 :
the highest octaves sound bad from Eb and this for the 3 tracks
==> I restore the factory calibration
–> no real difference
==> I do a calibration
–> no real difference
I think the higher notes are to be forgotten, at least in the current state.
Certainly this is the same on all machines.

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Thanks for confirming!
Maybe usable till G note…
So now I’m 100% sure that sending back my ST for this would have been a bad idea…

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test of the dual VCO’s, 3 hours after start-up :
TUNE 24 octave 1 :
the highest octaves sound bad from E
==> I restore the factory calibration
–> no real difference
==> I do a calibration
–> no real difference

Mine were pretty phasey and needed to be set with detune to about +/- 0.2. Didn’t have a chance to check the tuning across the range yet

I got this from Elektron:

" The analog tracks will always need their components to be warmed up to working temperature to provide the best results in terms of tuning and filter responses. But even though that is the case, we also have functionality in place to try to compensate for it as good as possible during the warm-up phase, and we also have manual calibrations that can be executed if needed. But some variations will always exist, and the first initial minutes will have the biggest variance.

Recently, we have seen occasional reports where oscillators have been slightly more off than expected (especially on low frequencies and certain notes have been more problematic than others). We have now started working on improving the calibration routine and hope to be able to include the improvements in the next OS update. Let me know if you have any questions."

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Hopefully they improve the calibration routine on the Rytm too.