The Official Sequential/Oberheim Forum
MODULAR => Dave Smith Modular => DSM03 => Topic started by: chysn on March 15, 2017, 06:55:10 PM
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If you wonder why the DSM03 includes an integrated digital low pass filter, there's a really good reason for it.
You're probably never going to use the DSM03's filter for its tone, or to do awesome filter sweeps. That's just not part of its whole thing. Whenever I compare it to the DSM01, or pretty much anything, I realize this again.
But it's absolutely necessary in the context of the DSM03's sound. Consider this short demo:
https://soundcloud.com/beige-maze/dsm03-filter-demo
The first fifteen seconds, the DSM03's filter is wide open, with no resonance. The feedback just builds up over the signal's lifetime, and there's a lot of grit. At 15 seconds, I move the cutoff down to 3:00 and the resonance up to 9:00. Now, each feedback cycle is slightly dampened, resulting in a natural-sounding fall-off. It's crisp and airy instead of crunchy. The resonance is important here. It brings back a good deal of the high frequency content that's lost in the dampening, at the expense of a little bit of volume.
This sort of thing can't be done with an external filter; to get this result, the signal must be dampened before being fed back into the signal path.
So I'm not going to dis the DSM03's filter. It has a job, and pulls it off beautifully.