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Snufflepuff wrote: ↑Sat Aug 20, 2022 3:53 pm
Can anyone with DSP knowledge speculate as to the cause of this noise issue? I would think, in a digital delay, the simplest default behavior would be an exact clean copy of the original signal. And then one could add tape saturation and spectral filtering if desired without any noise because, again, this is all digital. I don’t understand how undesirable noise just creeps in.
There's always some noise floor with an analog to digital conversion right? Maybe it could be filtered out so very quiet sounds are attenuated to silence. What about the situation where a little bit of that noise floor and high feedback makes the K-S sounds?
I would certainly not characterize the Mimeophon as noisey... (there's a lot of detail in this thread so I won't repeat myself...)
Snufflepuff wrote: ↑Sat Aug 20, 2022 3:53 pm
Can anyone with DSP knowledge speculate as to the cause of this noise issue? I would think, in a digital delay, the simplest default behavior would be an exact clean copy of the original signal. And then one could add tape saturation and spectral filtering if desired without any noise because, again, this is all digital. I don’t understand how undesirable noise just creeps in.
Well of what I know from the interview with Tom Erbe, the idea is to replicate tape machines while also using the internal noise for karplus-strong. And to do these things there is an internal noise floor. It could surely be made differently and surely have filtering (and there probably is some) in the end for much more clean bypass signal. But it seems it is an artistic choice. The company is literally called "make noise" and in no way have set out to do clean stuff, but instead raw stuff with character (check out the available STO waveforms e.g. it is nothing like normal clean stuff.).
When I bought Mimeophon a couple of years ago I was a bit surprised about the amount of noise, but it got way better with gain staging (which they added more opportunities for directly on mimeophon) and now it is simply a part of what kind of delay Mimeophon is. I can actually do all kinds of weird stuff with the noise as an added noise source when I am not using Mimeophon for delay. Can't do that with 4ms DLD as far as I know...
Last edited by Cpaf on Sun Aug 21, 2022 8:27 am, edited 1 time in total.
James_S wrote: ↑Sun Aug 21, 2022 8:22 am
Still on about the ground noise then?
I think about 20 pages ago I asked if not it was time to talk about creative patching techniques with Mimeophon - hah, but I guess there are always new people getting it, getting surprised :p
James_S wrote: ↑Sun Aug 21, 2022 8:22 am
Still on about the ground noise then?
I think about 20 pages ago I asked if not it was time to talk about creative patching techniques with Mimeophon - hah, but I guess there are always new people getting it, getting surprised :p
It's unbelievable, one of the most incredible modules of its kind and people just asking about a bit of ground noise. There's nothing else to say about it that hasn't been said during the last dozen pages. Feel bad for Make Noise that anyone reading this thread will start thinking it's basically a fog horn.
James_S wrote: ↑Sun Aug 21, 2022 8:22 am
Still on about the ground noise then?
I think about 20 pages ago I asked if not it was time to talk about creative patching techniques with Mimeophon - hah, but I guess there are always new people getting it, getting surprised :p
It's unbelievable, one of the most incredible modules of its kind and people just asking about a bit of ground noise. There's nothing else to say about it that hasn't been said during the last dozen pages. Feel bad for Make Noise that anyone reading this thread will start thinking it's basically a fog horn.
The very annoying thing about it is that - as evidenced on the last page - people are reading that and saying "what a horrible module, I can't use this because of all the problems" despite the fact that it is a very easy problem to avoid!
Anyhow: I'm all ears for creative patching techniques with Mimeophon. Anyone have any handy? Here's a simple one: send stepped modulation to Zone and have a wild amount of fun.
I’ll just chime in to say I’ve been reading this thread regularly and I don’t seem to have any noise issue. If I have it I can’t discern what it is. Mimeophon is one of the first modules I bought and remains one of my very favorites - I use it in almost every patch. Love it.
One patch trick - send synced modulation to zone (from a short to long zone) while also engaging flip to be on when in the long zone, and off when in the short zone. Do the same for mix and repeats to taste.
Especially with a sound source with lots going on or a full beat from a sample, it gets you intermittently into that "backwards time travel" sound (and back again) !
It responds incredibly well to modulation in every single input. Percussion going through the Mimeophon with tons of modulation can create all sorts of interesting polyrhythms and textures. It might even drown out all the noise
My favorite patching application is to send 0-Ctrl’s pressure output to repeats and the filter input (negative on the attentenuverter) so that it swells the feedback while also low-passing it. Gives you this beautiful BBD/analog texture that not a lot of digital delays can pull off.
hpc wrote: ↑Mon Aug 22, 2022 6:32 am
My favorite patching application is to send 0-Ctrl’s pressure output to repeats and the filter input (negative on the attentenuverter) so that it swells the feedback while also low-passing it. Gives you this beautiful BBD/analog texture that not a lot of digital delays can pull off.
When:
- Mix and Repeat are full CCW
- After increasing either of the two knobs, as soon as it goes back to full CCW, there is a glitch in the Zones
- None of the other parameters influence the outcome
- When in higher Zones, you can hit a "dead" zone and the Zone LED goes black
I wonder if this has anything to do with clearing the buffer since it requires Repetitions and Mix to be full CCW.
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I feel like I've got a pretty newb question here that I'm hoping someone could help clear up for my brain.
I have my Mimeophone in "stereo mode" with Skew flashing. It's Outs are routed to mono channels on my outboard mixer, both hard panned respectively. I've got a great stereo image, with the dry signal seeming to be in the center, and ping ponging delays out to the l&r. But, only if I use the dry/wet at 50% or lower...
If I crank wet beyond 50% it starts to behave like I'd expect, where the dry signal that usually sits mono in the stereo field starts to go away, and I start getting an almost binaural like effect (I think) where the delays start totally separating between l&r. But once fully wet, the left channel is noticeably louder than the right channel. In order to get what I think is a balanced ping pong effect, with what I think is total separation between L/R channels, I have to raise the volume fader up on the right channel of my mixer by 5-10 db!
I feel like I'm missing something fundamental trying to figure this out...or is it just the way the Mimeophone works? It's my only stereo delay, so I can't test on anything else.
*I guess I should add that the source signal into the Mimeophone is Mono.
From reading the manual and testing on my own: The signal path in ping-pong mode appears to be that the input always goes to the left delay buffer, and the left and right feedback paths are swapped. So, the level of each repeat after the first is going to depend on the setting of the REPEATS knob since that's the feedback attenuation. If you set REPEATS to infinite (100% level) then the pingpongs will be equal volume (but all previous sound will repeat too, of course).
If you want to hear the sequence of a dry center sound, then a left repeat, then a right repeat, with equal volume on the repeats, don't enable Ping-Pong mode — instead, enable regular Skew mode, use the rate control to set your delay timing, and set REPEATS all the way CCW.
If you want to hear repeated decaying pingponging of equal level on the two channels, then I suspect the Mimeophon can't do that (because it doesn't have independently controllable left-to-right and right-to-left attenuation) and you'd be better off with chaining two delays: one to do mono repeats, and one after that to delay the right channel. The 4ms Dual Looping Delay should be good at this, since it has two independently adjustable and patchable delays with a common clock source.
Last edited by kpreid on Wed Sep 14, 2022 9:56 am, edited 1 time in total.
Just an observation on the topic of floor noise. I’ve been putting up with it because I love the module but I’ve just removed my Befaco Hexmix & Hexpander from the case where it was permanently patched into one of the return inputs and now I’ve got a patch in place featuring the MM the floor noise has vanished.
What was the patch from sound source to output then vs now? If the only difference is the Hexmix, I'd imagine gain staging but there's other possibilities.
Plaits into Mimeophon (mix at zero) for 20 seconds followed by Plaits direct for 20 seconds. Some days seem to be better than others with this thing, but today — and more often than not — the noise drives me nuts.
For those who have noise issues did you try to adjust the input level by pressing flip and hold and cycle through the 4 different colors above the skew button? Did it help a bit?
dreamrobe wrote: ↑Mon Oct 31, 2022 9:46 am
For those who have noise issues did you try to adjust the input level by pressing flip and hold and cycle through the 4 different colors above the skew button? Did it help a bit?
Cheers, Dreamrobe. I was not expecting this to help, but I did manage to get a reduction in noise by boosting the Mimeophon input gain all the way and turning down the master output to about 1 on its dial. Now, the adjustments I make on the pre-Mimeophon mixer don't seem to affect the noise level.
The noise is still pretty evident, though, on quieter, sparser things, which happens to be the kind of stuff I often try to make, and maybe that's why some people notice Mimeophon's shortcomings more than others.
James_S wrote: ↑Sun Aug 21, 2022 8:22 am
Still on about the ground noise then?
I think about 20 pages ago I asked if not it was time to talk about creative patching techniques with Mimeophon - hah, but I guess there are always new people getting it, getting surprised :p
It's unbelievable, one of the most incredible modules of its kind and people just asking about a bit of ground noise. There's nothing else to say about it that hasn't been said during the last dozen pages. Feel bad for Make Noise that anyone reading this thread will start thinking it's basically a fog horn.
It’s not “just a bit of ground noise.” It’s noisy as fuck, and wouldn’t be acceptable in any audio application outside of modular (and if it weren’t a MN product, it probably wouldn’t be acceptable within modular either). Ground noise isn’t part of my problem. It’s digital noise. I’ve learned to sort of deal with it (namely by using a noise filtering plugin on its recording channels), but it would be nice to not have to do that.
