Audiothingies Doctor A

Don’t get me wrong, we sold all units made and made some money.
Designing it was fun and I learnt a lot of things in the process.

And MM2’s reverb is derived from Dr A’s plate algorithm :smiley:

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What about a MM3 with audio input ?

A fringe question: in the absence of availibility of a doctor A, I’m considering an effect to dedicate to my Waldorf M, and which for these same aspects:

  • a direct analog set path from input to output
  • on/off for effects like on the Doctor A, where on means sending signal to the effect and off let’s the effect ring out.

Any advice what I could look at?

I’m not sure if it’s nessecary to limit yourself to effects with an analog dry path. I guess in theory both could potentially have certain drawbacks. For instance an analog dry path could lead to flanging when there’s a short delay between the dry and the processed sound. It will probaply only be audible in certain situations, mostly with percussive material. When the dry sound gets converted, there could potentially be issues with the converters/conversion, but I guess the only way to find out is to test.

In my experience the issue with converted signal is latency, only noticeable on percussive sounds but inescapable, i.e. when playing against another percussive instrument. I don’t like it :slight_smile:

This is a reason for example I couldn’t have an Eventide pedal behind my Nord drum directly. As a send effect on the mixer, no problem. But as an insert, the tiny lag is disturbing (me at least)

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Funny you mentioned Eventide, because they wrote that they ran some tests and then specifically decided to go for converting the dry in the H9 in order to avoid flanging.

But good argument regarding latency. If you’re really sensitive to latency and you’re playing percussive instruments, I understand how that’s a problem.

I have my H9 Max and the Doc A as sends on the mixer, but always wanted to do some tests with them.

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I must admit I overlooked the Doctor A, I would consider buying a Doctor A MK2 / B!

That makes sense. My sense of logic (which may be weird) makes me think that for any effect that would need to be real time, like modulation/pitch effects, phasing would indeed be an issue. There absolutely nothing wrong with converting the dry signal and ensuring everything is delay compensated with the processing.

Now with reverbs and delays, not necessary, as the wet signal is never supposed to be exactly happening at the very same time than the dry.

When I tried the Timefactor as insert with the Nord drum, i experienced the latency in the dry signal and thought in this very case it wasn’t necessary.

That’s the beauty of Doctor A!

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Yeah, you’re right, it’s probaply more an issue with modulation effects, than it is with delays and reverbs.

Btw, the Strymon Timeline does not convert the dry signal afaik, not 100% sure if the delay rings out after bypass is switched on, but I thought they do. Those footswitches probably aren’t the best choice for playing with a delay in that way (the Doc A gets another point there!), but bypass can be controlled externally, so with some DIY skills one could build a control box with finger-friendly switched.

I actually built something similar for my H9, a switch and a potentiometer in a pedal enclosure to control the H9 via expression/cv input. The knob can control the macros or other parameters on the H9 (I like to use it to control delay feedback, a potentiometer feels much more natural than that big encoder dial), the switch engages the hotswitch function (flip between two “scenes” of parameters on reverbs and Pitchfactor algos). That works surprisingly well.

But the Doc A still wins for “playability”! It also responds so well to cv.
I really hope for a Doc B. Smaller enclosure, mini jacks, no cv is all fine with me. The core aspects for me are playability, it has nice big knobs, it sounds great, can be used as independent delay and reverbs - it’s possible to feed the delay from one send, return the delay mono - feed the reverb from another send and return it on another mono channel - or return both delay and reverb in a stereo channel.
Just the right amount of flexibility and parameters.

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