Great article and ten minute video on a guy who found and restored a large Moog synthesizer from 1967 - from Reverb:
Restoring an Original '67 Moog Modular Synthesizer
For nearly half a century, a piece of synthesizer history sat in storage at Roosevelt University in Chicago along Michigan Avenue. Circuits decaying, connections dirty and corroded, long-ago attempts at repair abandoned.
And then Mike Borish came along.
The real-estate-broker-turned-electronics-technician found out about the forgotten gem from a client who worked at the university.
After confirming with a professor exactly what it was that the client had seen - Unit 1029, one of only several dozen modular synthesizers built in the 1960s by R.A. Moog, synth pioneer Bob Moog’s first company - he knew what he had to do.
Borish had to open it up, get his hands in there, and bring it back to life.
Moog's genius was to make every parameter controllable by a voltage. He standardized on one volt per octave. This is an exponential shift - one octave below Concert A is 220 cycles per second (or Hz after Heinrich Hertz), add a volt and you are at Concert A at 440Hz, add another volt and you are one octave higher at 880Hz - you can see that this is not a linear progression. This was very difficult to do electronically but Moog persisted until he had a circuit that worked well and the rest of the world thanks him for it. It made the instrument musically useful.
Fast forward to today and all of Moog's patents have expired. The same technological advancements that have made computers so amazing have also happened for the rest of electronics so now there are builders who took the original Moog designs and have recreated them with current-day components. You have the same incredible depth and richness of sound but the machines stay in tune when the room temperature changes, the inherent noise is essentially non-existent and they are a lot more reliable. I am very pleased to own a large system from Roger Arrick at synthesizers.com
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