I was trying to get a 30Hz (B0) square wave out of SY RAW (WAV1 only), TUNE was set to 0 and I had to set NOTE to B2. Why is that? The manual says on appendix A, SY RAW, that “Value 0 corresponds to note C-2”, but I don’t understand what that means…
I also tried on SY BITS and I had to set NOTE=B1 and TUNE=0 to get 30Hz… why?
There is no single standard for labelling octaves. The practice that you have been used to with other equipment or software does not match the convention that Elektron uses.
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Ok, I thought I could be missing some configuration/parameter that was causing that offset…
Syntakt C0 (Note 0) corresponds to C-1 on Octatrack (and MD, MnM iirc). 
Which one ? 
As the examples above show, there is not even consistency between digital and analog machines…
It is consistent since Analog Four.
Just spent 30 mins explaining this to a couple of people on facebook. Interestingly they regard this as different manufacturers tuning their instruments/sequencers differently, whereas I see it from the perspective of labelling the notes differently. Same end result I guess but it seemed an odd way of looking at it to me.
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I agree with you. The MIDI standard clearly states that Middle C is MIDI note number 60, so pitch can be derived from the MIDI note number. What’s arbitrary is which octave label is given to MIDI note 60: often C4, sometimes C3 or C5.
This arose because different manufacturers used different octave labels to account for the MIDI note range of 0 to 127 whereas (as far as I know) Middle C = C4 is a common assignment for an 88 key piano.
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Concerning midi, I think C0 for note 0 is convenient (middle C = C5 = note 60).
I see. So maybe Elektron also labeled the base note as C0 (or whatever zero) for the digital and analog machines (like SY BITS and SY RAW), regardless for the actual frequency value, and it got inconsistent because their capabilities differs regarding that minimum.