Predictability and repeatability are important to me. Yes, that’s probably foolish. In the analog world, one never steps in the same river twice. But the control freak in me wants to minimize the chaos as much as possible. So for that reason, if no other, I’d rather not have any potentiometers involved in the voltage conversion. Plus I’m not thrilled with the idea of any inline gadgets and gizmos. The noodle soup is already thick enough.
When The Analog Thing finally arrives, and if I have the brain power to figure out how to use it, I’d like to be able to just plug it in. That means bidirectional conversion 1V <–> 10V.
Count this post as another request for a bank of divide by 10 in some form. I guess using two channels of a divide by 5 would be acceptable if it passed bipolar signal.
4ms Quad Pingable LFO can be configured to be +/-5V or 0V/+10V, and I’d rather run it in unipolar if the rest of my system could support it.
I love the chaotic Non Linear Circuits modules but they all run hot and need to be tamed, I am pretty sure getting to +/-10V, so I need to match them with their own dedicated scaling.
I’m yet to build a handful of Visible Signals’ Wrangler modules, which appear to be my best option so far, but losing 4HP per signal is a bit painful.
Doesn’t the 10x amplification that you want to run your LZX signals through also raise the noise floor, though? So while you might get a bit better signal-to-noise ration in the audio module than you would with 5x amplification, you’re also raising the noise floor of the signal that module will be processing, so it’s a trade off.
I’m talking about noise within the audio modules. If a module is designed to use a 0 to 10 V range, and you send it less than that, you might get less than satisfactory results. Could be noisy, and/or could have issues with functionality.
I should also mention that I’m planning to add at least one Tiptop Buchla clone, which is most definitely 0-10V.
One way to approach an interface would be one switch to set “source” scale, and one to set “destination” scale. Scales would be 1V, 2V, 5V, 10V, +/-1V, +/-2V, +/-5V, +/-10V on both sides (8 options.) I think that’s what it would take to do a “universal converter”, but that’s quite a lot of module (2x 8 position rotary switches) for each channel.
The most practical universal option if you have to pick just one is a simple divide by 5 attenuator. That brings the largest input +/-10V into the LZX headroom range of +/-2V, and translates 0-5V CV sources (pretty common standard Euro levels) to 0-1V exactly, and requires nothing but in/out jacks.