Tuesday 11 July 2023

Roland RS 202 - restored.

 Many thanks to Ed for restoring this lovely old string synth.

The RS-202 is all about the stings and was known as "Roland's finest string synth".
It's a forgotten gem that can still be found cheaply.

Introduced by Roland in 1976, it was the successor to the unloved Roland RS-101 which was released in 1975. 
It is also known to make the ultimate "disco strings" sounds. 
The RS-202 is "polyphonic" and is built into a solid wooden carry case. 
Its heavy too.

  The synthesizer uses simple sawtooth wave oscillators, which pass through a frequency divider in a similar manner to an electronic organ.

This gives the synth full polyphony across a five-octave keyboard.

The signal was fed through a single envelope shaper.
This this instrument is really paraphonic, not polyphonic. 
The front panel had two separate controls for the top and bottom of the keyboard... the bass section & the string section.
Thus it has independent  bass & string sounds.
To achieve a more realistic sound of an ensemble of string players, the output is fed through a chorus This effect uses a number of delay lines triggered by low frequency oscillators.

A side note, there is a early clone called Multivox. 
This was manufactured  in the USA. Called the MX-202, I think these are pretty rare. I've never heard one.


https://www.elkelektronik.com.au/ 

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