John Bowen Synth Design

Hello there - so, I thought I'd try putting my Analog 4 through the Solaris. But it was much, much quieter than the oscillators. So if I had a mixer with Ext. 1 for input one and an oscillator for input two I would have to put the level for the oscillator at around 10 and the Ext. 1 level at 63 for it to be anything like balanced volume-wise. So I thought perhaps it was a case of the Solaris operating at +4dBu and the Analog 4 operating at -10dBV. I get confused by all that stuff but it made sense to me - Analog 4 producing a voltage far less than the Solaris expects. That seemed odd, because I thought it unlikely that the Analog 4 operated at the -10dBV "semi-pro" level. So I checked the Analog 4 manual and apparently it puts out +19dBu. In my limited understanding that's plenty of signal so why is it so quiet in the Solaris? If I use outputs 3 and 4 to get the external signal straight out again, the same thing is observable - it's the same thing that is coming into the Solaris, but it's lost loads of level.

Just to double check I tried putting a Spectralis into the Solaris with the same result - lots of signal lost! So - where's it going and why, and what can I do about it.

Is anyone familiar with using the Analogue inputs and what sort of results have you had, please?

Many thanks for your attention and I look forward to hearing peoples thoughts.

Thank you.

I'll try my SE-1 tomorrow and see what I get out of it.

Yes, I agree that the input level for External signals is low, and we did have some discussion about it, but as with many other things, this issue was put on hold until a future time.
What you can try for the moment is to feed the external signal into more inputs. For example, in a mixer, you'll put Osc 1 into Input 1, and then Ext 1 into Mixer inputs 2,3, &4. For each input, you will add an additional 6 dB.
(You will note that I used this trick in a number of presets where I wanted the oscillator to be louder, so just putting it in several times to the same mixer.)

Oh, OK, thanks. I think I might try and get a little pre-amp somewhere down the road but that's for later. Really I just wanted to know if I was doing something obvious wrong!

If it was possible to get it into the schedule for changes to be made I think it would be good perhaps...

Thanks to Mambajim and to John for the usual swift and helpful response.

By the way, John, do you have any useful figures for assessing what might be a useful pre-amp to consider. I suppose really the question is "what level is the Solaris expecting?" Presumably pretty high, given that a high output device is still producing well short of the required level. I suppose it is xdBu or xdBV or whatever scale is being used - but what is x and which scale is being used?

Thanks again