Dr. Mabuse's Tourette's Circuit!
Designed by the mysterious Dr. Mabuse, the Tourette's Circuit is a better example of a feedback control system than i ever encountered in the five tries it took me to pass Control Systems in college...The good Doc built one of these devices (obviously influenced by Krell technology) for Grant Richter with a plexiglass faceplate. I was so impressed by the sound of this thing that I pestered Dr. Mabuse with questions until he let me in on some of the secrets of the design.
Figure 1: my own attempt at constructing a Tourette's circuit in a standalone enclosure.
Some Sound Files:
clip 1
clip 2
clip 3
clip 4
Figure 2: Process Diagram for Dr. Mabuse's Tourette's Circuit. From the left, the circuit starts with two voltage controlled oscillators of the triangular persuasion. The outputs of these VCOs are fed to the trough processor, which performs an algebraic function on the signals. This processed signal is sent to two sample-and-hold devices. The processed signal is also fed to a comparator, which compares it to a user-specified voltage between +/-15v. The comparator sends out a clock pulse when the input signal is greater than the u.s.v. This train of pulses is attacked by a clock divider, which emits an arrangement of divisions of the clock frequency in orders of 2^n, separated into camps depending on whether n is odd or even. these divisions of frequency are siphoned off and provide the clock tick which controls the sample and hold devices. The outputs of the sample-and-holds is ultimately used to control the frequencies of the VCOs. The output of the circuit is taken from the meat grinder, er, the output of the trough processor. Wow!