If you say so…
Just checked the website you referenced for the kits just to help resolve your doubts - the main board price quoted there is 24 euros and a filterboard pcb is 25 euros (so that’s 50 euros just for bare pcbs).
As I said JLCpcb will produce pcbs for $2 for five pcbs - that’s a pretty significant saving straight away… if you were making 10 shruthis (as you say you did), then just in terms of the pcbs you would have saved nearly 500 euros… to me that’s a pretty significant saving for literally about 10 minutes effort in creating and uploading the gerbers and entering credit card details… I dont value my time to that amount but YMMV…
I wont break down the part costs for you - but it would only take 5 or 10 minutes to get quotes on the BoMs…
(To be honest, if I was making 10 of them I’d spend a couple of hours converting the pcbs to surface mount and get all ten sets made up as pcba at eg jlcpcb - that would save a huge amount of time and be trivially cheap - based on other pcbs I’ve done I’d guess you could have all 10 made up and soldered for about $60 - $80 ish… then you would just need to buy connectors, screens, encoders. Plus cut a few acrylic cases - but acrylic sheet is pretty cheap).
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To the owners of Shruthi with the 4PM filter board…
Do you also experience significant loundness drop when increasing reasonance, with the Liquid resonance flavour?
According to docs of the board there is loudness compensation, but in my case the bottom drops significantly pretty quickly when I raise resonance. I’m wondering if my board is somehow broken in this regard (otherwise all seems ok), or is the compensation just too subtle?
I’ve just ordered one which will arrive tomorrow so will test and report back!
I think I’m done with mono synths for now - can’t wait to run my other monos through the 4Pole filters!! Got a Neutron, Minibrute 2S, Bro-1 and Microfreak so now I feel have all the osc and filter flavours I’ve ever wanted… Famous last words.
(edit - forgot I also have an SE-02!)
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I’d be curious if the Shruthi can go places that a Mini or Microfreak can’t. I’m saving up for a Minifreak so that I can rope in all those esoteric oscillators and run them through an analog filter…hopefully I won’t be tempted by Shruthi after that.
I have a Shruthi XT, and my friend has a micro freak so I have messed with both… I think the thing you get with the Shruthi is the filter card… depending on which one is installed the synth can sound very different… The microfreak that mod matrix is pretty crazy…
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I built the SMR4 MkII card for my own project. Easily the cleanest filter I’ve ever owned, which is a great compliment to the MS-20 and Polivoks filters I have. It just sounds so good.
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I love the Microfreak’s arp/seq and spice and dice functions for generating new patterns. I’ll still use it for that even if I end up preferring the osc and filters on the Shruthi. And I reckon sequencing them together for a layered sound will be awesome.
I was also strongly considering a Minifreak to get the polyphony and other extra performance features and modulators. Shame there’s no CV IO on it like the Microfreak though. I’ll keep both if I do get one!
I can’t really justify the cost though since I’ve already got an Ambika with 6 SVF cards which is a really powerful digital osc poly with lots of different osc flavours available.
If you don’t have a nice 6+ voice poly and you can deal with the mini keys (or need them for space reasons!) I think the Minifreak is a great choice if you like the oscs and filters and can handle the limitations and would likely pair nicely with a Shruthi.
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Hi @wjakobczyk I’ve spent a good few hours with my new 4PM shruthi last night - was gonna post a video but got deep on making patches and exploring the synth parameters, getting used to navigating around the UI.
I definitely noticed that the low frequencies became heavily attenuated on all the LP filter models (and flavours) when resonance was raised even just a little.
I also read about the loudness compensation on the Liquid filter flavour however maybe that refers to cutting the overall volume when the resonance is very high?
I need to read more of the documentation and also check firmware versions etc. The low end drop was a little disappointing at times but I did manage to make some lovely patches nonetheless! I don’t think it’s a fault - I suspect it’s the profile/behaviour of the filter circuits as designed.
I will do more research this eve and I’ll post a video with some experiments if I can muster the energy!
Overall I’m really enjoying it though - it can have a very thick and forward sound which I like.
https://pichenettes.github.io/mutable-instruments-diy-archive/shruthi/4pm/
Try and perform the V/oct tuning from this page.
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That is precisely the page I was planning to revisit later - thanks for the suggestion! I suspect this will improve the filter behaviour and will definitely be worth doing.
Thanks for the rundown! I’ve had a Shruthi XT and even an Ambika in the past and they are no doubt great sounding - I distinctly remember that. With the kind of music I’m making these days and my goal to play live - I am pretty set on the Minifreak for the built-in effects, fast mod matrix, sequencer tricks, etc.
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Hi all again - re the low end cuts when res is raised issue… I’ve adjusted the v/oct tuning and it has certainly improved the self-osc intonation. The filter range trimmer is tougher to set - I’m not sure I’ve nailed that setting to its optimal position yet but it’s certainly far better than it was and the low end does not reduce as much as before when the resonance is high (or any non-zero value). Still some reduction but nowhere near as much as before. I think I can still squeeze a bit more ‘range’ out of the filter range trimmer but felt it was good enough and wanted to put the case back together and actually use it to make some sounds.
I may revisit those trimmers after a few weeks.
Thanks @talondnb for the suggestion!
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