Most of them are controlled with Digipots, but yeah indeed it was not easy to get it working for all the different setups.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
No worries, I appreciate the responses, knowing it's a digipot has satisfied most of my curiosity! :)
It's a inhouse design with a PCM3060 as audio codec.
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?
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 220€ years ago, before they bumped the price to about 300€ - bummer, I was considering the purchase of a spare one. Apparently it was too good to be that cheap.
Most of them are controlled with Digipots, but yeah indeed it was not easy to get it working for all the different setups.
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!
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.
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 th…
Most of them are controlled with Digipots, but yeah indeed it was not easy to get it working for all the different setups.
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?
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/…
It's a inhouse design with a PCM3060 as audio codec.
Do you know which digipots were used? Like ericwood above I too have heard anecdotal reports discouraging their use in most analog audio circuits.
Most of them are controlled with Digipots, but yeah indeed it was not easy to get it working for all the different setups.
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?
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
It's a inhouse design with a PCM3060 as audio codec.
Do you know which digipots were used? Like ericwood above I too have heard anecdotal reports discouraging their use in most analog audio circuits.
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.