Tiptop Audio SD808, Mint. Works great.
The SD808 is Roland's TR-808 snare drum sound generator adapted for modular synthesizer use. The front panel contains all of the controls found on the original TR-808 drum machine, allowing you full control over the snare drum timbres, volume levels to mix with other drums, and accent levels. The module itself is very simple and straightforward to operate; however, we highly encourage you to read this manual as it contains useful information that will help you get much more out of the SD808. These electronic drums are the heart and soul of our electronic music generation and learning how to use them correctly will open up a world of organic analog beats and sounds for you to utilize in your own music.
The SD808 is a one-to-one clone of the original circuit found in Roland's TR-808 drum machine. The TR-808 was manufactured from 1980 till 1984, during this time Roland had revised parts of the machine according to what they believed would make it either sound better or electrically work better. One of the circuits that was
changed over time is the machine's white noise source: this noise source feeds different sound generators and among them is the snare drum. The freedom of having a dedicated noise source per each of our drum module allowed us to set it according to what we found to sound better, and in the case of the SD808 we went with what Roland thought to be an improvement and adapted the later noise circuit design.
When compared to several original machines we found a lot of variation, both in sound clarity at different settings, length of the envelope, and timbre changes resulting from different levels of accent. So is the SD808 sound like the original?
We believe so, the SD808 follows the original schematic and its representing math precisely, down to the smallest details.
