[HN Gopher] Stompenberg FX: Demo and play over 150 pedals live v... ___________________________________________________________________ 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] ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-03-19 23:02 UTC)