Run Sound Lab on 12 or 15 volts?

[kjackman]

I'm considering integrating a stripboard version of the Sound Lab into an existing system that will run at plus or minus 12 or 15 volts (haven't decided that part yet). I could rig up +9v and -9v voltage regulators to feed the Sound Lab, but the "Power Supply Clarification" on the Sound Lab Plus page seems to imply that it can run on other voltages just fine (within reason, obviously). Is this true? If so, how would that affect its behavior?

[Captain Biscuits]

I found my Sound Lab worked much better once I moved from 2 9v batterys to an MFOS wall wart 12v supply. I've not tried it with 15v.

It's heaps of fun.

Enjoy!

Cheers

Ian

[jordroid]

Nothing will blow up on +/-15 volts (that wasn't going to anyways), it maaaay want a few resistors recalculated, but it may work just fine. I think the only real advice we can give is to try it and see if it acts funny.

Peak to peak voltages of the VCOs, LFO and AR generator may be a little bit different, i can't imagine this would be a huge problem.

The potentiometers that reference the power supply rails (R19, R37, R202 etc.) may act differently. They tend to have resistors between the power rail and the pot, and a resistor between the wiper of the pot and whatever input they feed, if one is not feeling right you could mess with those resistors. The resistor between the wiper and input will in general change the entire range of control (more range or less range), while the resistors between the power rail and the pot will alter the range of control asymmetrically, for instance if you made R50 larger, the lowest frequency of VCO1 would be the same, but the highest frequency would be less high than before.

The biasing of the VCF and VCA may be thrown off a little, or maybe not, i'd try it and see. If you end up with asymmetric clipping or other bias weirdness you could try futzing with the resistors responsible for biasing these sections, i'm a bit out of my depth here but you can see in the VCA for instance there are several resistors doing some kind of bias duty, R24, R25 and R26 it looks like. My guess is you will be fine.

cheers

jordan