J Haible Tau Pipe Phase Shifter PCB Project

[DiyFreaque]

Phase Shifter Afficianados:  Juergen Haible is working on a PCB that will bring back that incredible 20 stage phase shifter, the Tau Pipe.  In case you'd like to chime in, or indicate a desire for the PCB, there's a thread about it here on the Electro-Music music forum. 

http://www.electro-music.com/forum/topic-18396-25.html&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=

Hope this isn't OT (don't think so - a guitar can be as radically phased with this thing as anything else).  Thought you guitar guys might be as interested in it as synth guys.

Cheers,
Scott

[John Lyons]

Yowza! 20 stages!!
I'll have to chack that out.

Thanks for the link.
John

[markusw]

Thanks a lot for that link!!

After listening to the samples I definitely will join the list 

Markus

[sfx1999]

Why not just build a flanger?

[DiyFreaque]

Because the distribution and number of notches between a twenty stage phase shifter and a flanger is totally different, and each render a much different audio quality.  A phase shifter would have to have a prohibitive number of stages to approach the jet plane affect of a flanger.  By the same token, the sweep of a flanger would never be able to emulate the distribution of notches a multi-stage phase shifter produces throughout the sweep of the flangers delay range - they're just two different beasts.

John, I went up to 32 stages on my Multiphase project.  It's Vactrol based, so the effect is quite a bit different than the pipe - it's more difficult to make Vactrols march in a straight line like transistors in a ladder. 

In any event, I loved the effect.

Info on it here:

http://mypeoplepc.com/members/scottnoanh/birthofasynth/id18.html

Cheers,
Scott

[Mark Hammer]

When you want a flanger to sweep "low-er", you need to make the longest delay longer.  The jet plane doppler effect will most certainly depend on the brevity of the shortest delay time (and shorter is better), but notches inserted lower in the spectrum will require delays of upwards of 9-10msec.  At those delay times, you do start to notice the stagger between dry and wet, and if you turn up the resonance without deliberately tone-shaping the resonance you get a sort of box-ey sound that many don't like.  (The boxey sound is probably the chief complaint people have about the Boss BF-2).

In contrast, although number of degrees of phase shift IS time delay, there is no full-spectrum time delay in the case of phase shifters, such that sweeping "lower" needn't involve more perceptible time-stagger.  Indeed, you can sweep as low as you want with only a single notch produced from 2 stages.  There are of course reasons to see the yoked nature of sweep width and #notches as advantageous in the case of the flanger, but there are similarly reasons to see the dissociability of notch quantity and sweep swing/width as useful in the case of the phase-shifter.  Tapping stages in a phase shifter will allow one to dictate #notches in a fixed predictable way.  You can, in a sense, dictate #notches in flangers by filtering the wet signal prior to the mixing stage to be able to restrict where cancellations can occur.  Such attempts at control will still not control the number of notches in as predictable a manner.  You'll be able to get fewer notches, but their number will still tend to increase as you sweep lower, even if not as much as before.

Whatever you prefer, do keep in mind that many of the most impressive samples you will hear for uber-phasers will be of much greater bandwidth and diffuse spectral content than what a guitar normally produces.  Once you switch to guitar that isn't ridiculously fuzzed and played through amps with extended frequency response a lot of those additional notches will seem to diappear.  Obviously you can't hear a notch when there is little frequency content to notch filter in that frequency band.  That's certainly not a reason to find such complex phasers useless or uninteresting.  Just keep in mind that you won't necessarily get such majestic sounds from a guitar without additional tricks.

[SeanCostello]

Old flexidisc sound sheet demo of Tau Pipe Phase:

http://www.keyboardmuseum.org/soundsheet/the%20pipe%20phase.html

Sounds FANTASTIC.

It is interesting to me how phasers can have such different sounds, depending on the number of stages. I love 4-6 stage phasers, but 8 to 12 stage phasers leave me cold (with the exception of the 8-stage Schulte Compact A Phaser, which sounds great, but only has feedback around 2 stages). Meanwhile, this 20-stage phaser sounds like everything I like about flanging, with none of the drawbacks.

Sean Costello

[sfx1999]

Looking at that schematic, I see a part labeled as a phase delay module or something similar, but no schematic for the internals. How will this be replicated?

[DiyFreaque]

How will this be replicated?

Juergen Haible 

[StephenGiles]

Looking at that schematic, I see a part labeled as a phase delay module or something similar, but no schematic for the internals. How will this be replicated?

Trust Herr Haible my friend, he has vays of making zer delay.

[Paul Perry (Frostwave)]

Jurgen is remarkably talented & hard working - and a very impressive e-musician as well! http://home.debitel.net/user/jhaible/hj.html

Oh, and an all-round good guy as well!

[DiyFreaque]

How will this be replicated?

Juergen Haible 

His sample of it:
http://electro-music.com/forum/download.php?id=8398

 

Pics of the board are in the thread now:
http://electro-music.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=18396&start=75&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=

Cheerios,
Scott

[lowstar]

awesome 

[GREEN FUZ]

Sounds stunning. The parts count has scared me off though.

[widdly]

Mr Haible's DIY polyphonic Korg clone blows my mind.   

[StephenGiles]

On Riddlesdown today,  where we walk our dog, there was a family "fun day". Of course our dog having 3 legs attracted a great deal of attention and whilst talking to some ladies on a stall raising money for an animal rescue centre, they gave Bonzo a squeaker toy. He ignored it at first, then gradually started to chew at it and make it squeak. I thought that the sound if recorded would sound great through a flanger or phaser. When we got home, we watched him making it squeak almost to the point of the sound becomming annoying! I went upstairs to get my minidisc recorder and mic, but by the time I returned to the squeaking room, he had chewed through the toy and the squeaker no longer worked! Oh well, next time I'll have the minidisc ready when we give the sqeaker toy to the dog!

[skiraly017]

Got an email from Jurgen saying the boards are in. Looking forward to building the Pipe Phase but damn, it does look intimidating.

[dano12]

Got an email from Jurgen saying the boards are in. Looking forward to building the Pipe Phase but damn, it does look intimidating.

Woot! I've got two boards on order. One for me and one for my guitar.

[DWBH]

How much does each pcb cost?

[skiraly017]

How much does each pcb cost?

Cost me $43 to SoCal.