[HN Gopher] Stompenberg FX: Demo and play over 150 pedals live v...
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Stompenberg FX: Demo and play over 150 pedals live via the internet
Author : Chirono
Score : 94 points
Date : 2021-03-19 06:39 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.thomann.de)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.thomann.de)
| navbaker wrote:
| Is there some mute button I'm missing? I've tried with both
| Chrome and Edge to play the pre-recorded riffs for a few
| different pedals and am not getting any sound. I verified I have
| volume on my end with a youtube video.
| fpgaminer wrote:
| Same problem; I had to refresh the page to get it working.
| ericwood wrote:
| I have so many questions as to how they're handling controlling
| knob changes! From the pictures it looks like they've yanked the
| pots out and hooked the boards up to their rig, which raises more
| questions.
|
| This is something I've tried myself, and it's not trivial.
| Digipots won't work in the signal path and are noisy and
| imprecise, so companies that do this (there are very few!) like
| Chase Bliss use vactrols. Using those precisely is still tricky,
| as pot values in many circuits are all over the place and have
| different tapers, whereas most vactrols have a voltage/resistance
| curve that looks more logarithmic.
|
| Would love more information on this, as it's a topic that's
| difficult to research.
| diggan wrote:
| This is the only snippet of information I could find about it.
| Seems indeed like noise and imprecision would be issues even if
| replacing the knobs and switches, the imprecision you could
| live with as it's a demo, but the noise certainly is not
| wanted.
|
| > The first step is to dismantle them, measure the
| potentiometers and replace them with digital potentiometers and
| switches.
|
| https://www.thomann.de/blog/en/stompenberg-fx-speaker-simula...
| RedCapybara wrote:
| Most of them are controlled with Digipots, but yeah indeed it
| was not easy to get it working for all the different setups.
| squarefoot wrote:
| Did you consider driving the original pots in place through
| servos fixed to the pots shafts through shaft extenders? If
| yes, were there any drawbacks that made you discard the
| option?
| unmasked_poker wrote:
| Our main concerns were a) the conversion process would be
| much more complicated b) hardware would be more expensive
| c) the motors would not live as long as the digi-potis
| bydo wrote:
| Since you seem to have been involved with this in some way:
| thanks! You've earned at least one customer who had never
| heard of your company before.
| ericwood wrote:
| Did you run into noise issues? I actually haven't tried a
| digipot in a signal path (they do work great for other
| controls like LFOs and the delay time on a PT2399), but
| everything I've read online has told me to avoid it. I'm not
| hearing any in the demos so clearly it's workable!
| unmasked_poker wrote:
| The digipotis were actually one of the hardest problems for
| this project. Additional to the many pot values and
| different tapers, you need to also cover a wide variety of
| voltages that can even be centered around zero (it is an
| audio signal after all), so you need to be able to handle
| negative voltage. DigiPots also have a capacitance, so when
| you have to replace high values like 1M-Ohm you will wind
| up with a low pass filter. We built a bunch of modules for
| common pot values and do the taper and uncommon values in
| software. If both sides of a poti are used, we will need to
| use two digipotis to simulate them.
| ericwood wrote:
| Super interesting, thanks for taking the time to chime
| in! I hadn't thought about the capacitance aspect. Was
| noise not as much of an issue as I've been led to
| believe?
| RedCapybara wrote:
| Many many problems (several revisions), but I cannot go
| into them, because fortunately I was not part of the
| hardware design team. Definitely nothing I would recommend
| as part time project.
| ericwood wrote:
| No worries, I appreciate the responses, knowing it's a
| digipot has satisfied most of my curiosity! :)
| unmasked_poker wrote:
| Noise was a hard problem as well. In the end what helped us
| a lot was to keep the FX device in its own case and even
| solder the digi potis right in place where the real potis
| had been before. You can see that here: https://im.static-
| thomann.de/pics/images/stompenberg/backsta...
|
| The relais modules are on the outside of the case, but on
| the left you will see a flatband cable (digital) run inside
| of the case, where the digipoti modules will sit. So all
| analog signals never leave the original case and the metal
| housing shields all kinds of external interference.
| [deleted]
| codetrotter wrote:
| I wanted to do the same with hardware synthesizers, and was
| planning on calling the service SynthCloud but that name was
| already taken by someone else doing something else, and that's my
| excuse :p
| Tade0 wrote:
| Hats off to those who came up with this and convinced their
| superiors that it's worth trying.
|
| Most pedal demos don't give a very good idea how something will
| sound with _your_ setup, because well, they 're using their own,
| filtered through speakers and microphones at that.
| diggan wrote:
| You can turn off the speaker simulation + route your own setup
| in the "live" mode. I gave it a quick try and seems to work
| quite well, although the latency is quite annoying. But it's a
| demo, not performance tool after all.
| RedCapybara wrote:
| They are self hosted in southern Germany and you connect via
| WebRTC, so if you are far away from there it will have
| additional latency, sorry no way around it.
| diggan wrote:
| I'm in Spain so probably closer than most others here on
| HN, the latency is really not that bad. Seems you're
| related to Thomann/Stompenberg, so just wanted to thank you
| for this service! Will certainly help me in finding pedals
| without having to go through the buy/sell process I'm
| currently doing.
| RedCapybara wrote:
| Glad you like it! Thanks!
| nightvisi0n wrote:
| There's also a video showcasing this project over at their synth
| channel at youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lBYRQUTzYk
| anotheryou wrote:
| He talks crap. Housing staid on and what you see is just the
| control boards...
| RileyJames wrote:
| I started on a project of this nature about 2 years ago. So cool
| that they've follow through.
|
| My method was to have users record samples, re-amp them through
| each pedal, record the output and then make that available back
| to the user.
|
| It wasn't live/realtime. And the pedal setting has to be pre-
| defined.
|
| It worked, but it was limited. My intention was to use it for
| rare / vintage / analog pedals.
|
| Fun project, but this execution is waaaaay better. Very glad
| someone got it.
| mutagen wrote:
| This is genius and makes me wonder why I didn't think of it.
|
| Edit: they already thought of that!
| pta2002 wrote:
| This is an absolutely amazing tool and is one of the main reasons
| I keep buying stuff from Thomann - I'm looking at a pedal, see
| the little Stompenberg FX demo popup and I can try it out right
| from my home! It's great and has definitely directly influenced
| some of my purchases. Hope they never get rid of it!
| tpmx wrote:
| The idea and the execution is seriously innovative and
| impressive.
|
| (After troubleshooting a local issue with a failing USB
| microphone I can verify that the live mode works great. This is
| the real deal.)
|
| Don't miss the photos of the physical setup from the gallery
| features to the right of the pedal detail pages; excerpt:
|
| https://im.static-thomann.de/pics/images/stompenberg/backsta...
|
| https://im.static-thomann.de/pics/images/stompenberg/backsta...
|
| https://im.static-thomann.de/pics/images/stompenberg/backsta...
|
| It's Raspberry Pi-based. Can anyone identify that presumably
| audio add-on board with lots of connectors? Perhaps it's a one-
| off inhouse design.
| deelowe wrote:
| Looks custom. That's quite a board sitting on top.
| https://im.static-thomann.de/pics/images/stompenberg/backsta...
| tpmx wrote:
| Yikes.
| deelowe wrote:
| Yeah. Makes you wonder why the PI was even needed.
| unmasked_poker wrote:
| The PI is needed for bridging our PCM3060 based custom
| sound card(via hardware i2s) with a WebRTC client that
| connects to the customer. It also handles all the high
| end internet connectivity and allows us to easily flash
| the microcontrollers with new software. It could have
| been done with audiointerfaces instead, but this approach
| is truly modular and allows us to scale it easily.
| tpmx wrote:
| Well, it's a well-engineered, -documented, and -supported
| stable platform to handle computing needs for that giant
| board. Makes perfect sense, I think.
| RedCapybara wrote:
| It's a inhouse design with a PCM3060 as audio codec.
| joefourier wrote:
| Do you know which digipots were used? Like ericwood above I
| too have heard anecdotal reports discouraging their use in
| most analog audio circuits.
| nightvisi0n wrote:
| afaik they are mostly discouraged because of the various
| challenges coming with them (like zero crossing at high
| amplitudes, capacitance, etc), but it's not like it's
| impossible to deal with all of that.
| tpmx wrote:
| After doing my research: Thomann is a very large reseller
| (1700 employees according to wikipedia) in musical equipment.
|
| What's the story behind how a reseller got into designing
| custom raspberry pi add-on boards to demo third party pedals
| online?
| bvm wrote:
| Thomann are a brilliant company, old school customer
| service, competitive prices, great selection. I hate that
| Brexit has made buying from them not worth it.
| tpmx wrote:
| Not a musician, but it's kinda cool that they grew from
|
| https://thumbs.static-
| thomann.de/thumb/thumb1000x/pics/image...
|
| to
|
| https://thumbs.static-
| thomann.de/thumb/thumb1000x/pics/image...
|
| I know exactly what you mean with "old school customer
| service". I really hope these niched retailers stray
| strong against Amazon.
| ixfo wrote:
| They're still managing to ship to the UK. You lose all
| the consumer protection (thanks, Conservative party!) and
| have to pay VAT and import dues (thanks, Conservative
| party!) but they're managing. They're still a fab
| company.
| squarefoot wrote:
| They also are behind the design of Harley Benton branded
| instruments, which are made in China although under a
| decent quality control. I have two HB 5 string basses, the
| former was the bare minimum I could afford to move to the 5
| strings world and see how I adapted to it. That bass wasn't
| great but it was well set up and tuned, had a decent neck
| binding, the electronic was really quiet and the sound,
| although a bit rubber-ish and lacking some sustain, was
| good enough for playing in a band in which the guitarist
| played gear that cost 10 times more without anyone
| noticing. One year later I purchased one of their HBZ-2005,
| which besides being a piece of beauty sounds fantastic. I
| paid it about 220EUR years ago, before they bumped the
| price to about 300EUR - bummer, I was considering the
| purchase of a spare one. Apparently it was too good to be
| that cheap.
| nightvisi0n wrote:
| According to their blog posts it was a contract work by
| another company:
| https://feinarbyte.de/projekte/stompenberg/ (german site)
| rbinv wrote:
| More details here: https://www.thomann.de/blog/en/stompenberg-fx-
| speaker-simula...
| [deleted]
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(page generated 2021-03-19 23:02 UTC)