In case you haven't noticed, we take hardware research and emulation very seriously here at Plogue.
-We never take any information for granted, whether its from official datasheets, patents or third party research.
-We always double check and investigate what we do on hardware: creating custom tests suites for each and every chip, sending values and capturing the results digitally.
-We then create models and iteratively refine them as we add new tests, often for virtually every possible edge case there is.
You can imagine that this is a long, VERY long process. We sadly never know when our products will ship because simply knowing how an integrated circuit works in and out does not magically make it a product! (stating the obvious)
We started this project 8 years ago but it really started kicking into speed in the last 3. Back then there wasn't a single 'speech chip' plugin out there(at least I think). And there is now a handful of them, and STILL we are not ready to party with the rest of them.
We hope that this new blog series will help you wait a little bit longer for what we hope will be the one that sets the standard, like chipsounds did.
PART1:
It all began with gathering, or more like compulsive hoarding of nearly every vintage consumer device that talked. We set our start point to 1975, the date where the first ever speech synthesizer IC reached the market, the TSI Speech+ up to the dawn of the 90's where essentially everything went boringly intelligible.
How many devices are we talking about?
Quite a lot actually.
-We always double check and investigate what we do on hardware: creating custom tests suites for each and every chip, sending values and capturing the results digitally.
-We then create models and iteratively refine them as we add new tests, often for virtually every possible edge case there is.
You can imagine that this is a long, VERY long process. We sadly never know when our products will ship because simply knowing how an integrated circuit works in and out does not magically make it a product! (stating the obvious)
We started this project 8 years ago but it really started kicking into speed in the last 3. Back then there wasn't a single 'speech chip' plugin out there(at least I think). And there is now a handful of them, and STILL we are not ready to party with the rest of them.
We hope that this new blog series will help you wait a little bit longer for what we hope will be the one that sets the standard, like chipsounds did.
PART1:
It all began with gathering, or more like compulsive hoarding of nearly every vintage consumer device that talked. We set our start point to 1975, the date where the first ever speech synthesizer IC reached the market, the TSI Speech+ up to the dawn of the 90's where essentially everything went boringly intelligible.
How many devices are we talking about?
Quite a lot actually.
Your obsessions continue to be admirable — and what a way to preserve the heritage of speech synthesis while evolving it further! Looking forward to future blog entries. :D
ReplyDeleteThanks! my obsessions are indeed a major part of it :)
DeleteFantastisch! Can't wait to read more blog posts and, eventually, see the final product! Really cool!
ReplyDeleteAs a C64 musician from the '80s, I've owned Chipsounds since it was released and love it for the convenience of getting authentic SID manipulation on modern hardware - nothing else comes close. I'm sure Chipspeech will be equally amazing, however long it takes! David, your 'obsessive' research is highly commendable in an age when the norm is for VSTs and 8-bit style homages/remakes to make massive concessions in the look and sound of the games of the era they attempt to emulate.
ReplyDeletethis is great news I own many of these speech hardware machines to have it all inna pllugin will be fantastic. if you need any beta tester just get in touch
ReplyDelete