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Saturday, October 01, 2011

Octave Kitten Vintage Analog Synth

via this auction

"An Octave Kitten from the late 70s, roughly along the lines of an ARP Axxe, or a single oscillator Octave Cat, which is of course very similar to an ARP Odyssey. If you compare features, you will notice that this is much more than simply half a Cat, just as the Axxe is more than half an Odyssey. You will have noticed the price of Cats these days too, of course.. I have been using this with my own Axxe for a poor man's Odyssey, (with a Moog Ring Mod in there too), similar results, but considerably cheaper!"

"At present the synth is fully working except for the filter section. This is on a different circuit board & looks an older design, much like early ARP gear, more solderflow circuit than PCB. There are a couple of jumper leads, & some factory-cut traces. The ICs are socketed, but those look a little corroded, was planning to clean or replace them. Actually, I did recap this board too, come to think of it, as I had the components to hand, but haven't spent time checking the traces or connections. At the moment, you can affect the Filter Cutoff slightly when the Resonance is full on, other than that, nothing much happening, the Modulation knobs not affecting the sound either, except when switched to S/H.. it does the S/H thing very well!"



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