My Sparks arrived today, and I’ve been playing around with it all evening. I noticed when running some synths through it that use hard panning (drum voices are sent to either the left or right channel) that it seems like the ENV and GATE functions are only listening to the left channel. Is this correct? And is there any way to have them respond to both stereo channels, or just the Right channel?
I’ve been getting some great sounds out of Sparks, but this limits my ability to use the Gate and Envelope functions on some of these stereo synths.
Thanks!
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You’re correct, the envelope and gate detector only listens on the left channel. This might seem like a strange decision but it was the result of a complex situation.
Sparks went through 8 hardware design revisions over the last year and a half and there were a number of things I was focused on getting right — keeping digital noise out of the analog signal path, ensuring the noise floor was as low as possible, getting a clean LFO up to 1kHz, all the internal synth features, the user interface… There were a lot of things to tie together.
The env detector was initially set up to listen to the left which usually works great, since most people seem to use Sparks with instruments or inputs where the material is similar enough on both channels. In this configuration it can also be used as a sidechain compressor where the envelope from the left compresses the right channel for ducking effects. Still, I knew some people might see it as a limitation - I did investigate updating it towards the end of the development cycle but the microprocessor was completely maxed out and there were no pins left to use. I was concerned about making a last minute design change to sum the left and right (how this is typically done on a bus compressor). We also beta tested Sparks with 30 people and it was never brought up. So at the time I decided it might be a tolerable constraint and that another hardware revision could potentially lead to other problems / tradeoffs and we left it as-is.
That said, I completely understand that for some people’s setup it might be an undesirable limitation, and I want you and everyone who uses Sparks to be happy with it. I do have a hunch about how I can make it work. I’ll need a little time to investigate but if it works as expected we can offer a quick and simple upgrade with minimal inconvenience and no cost to you. If that is of interest please shoot me an email at jaak@kinotoneaudio.com and I’ll keep in touch with you.
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Thanks for confirming my suspicions. I actually use a lot of hard panned stereo synths in my setup, like the Lorre-Mill Double Knot, and various Ciat-Lonbarde synths, as well as ping-pong delays and so on, so this winds up being something that’s often relevant to my signal flow.
I think it would be good to mention this in the user manual in the sections on the Gate and Envelope, because, particularly with the Gate, it can result in some really unexpected output (your right channel getting muted!) if you don’t understand what’s going on, especially since there’s no way to change to a Right-channel dominant configuration.
The way it works now does allow for some interesting sidechain-like patterns that I wouldn’t have discovered otherwise. A version that allowed you to select between left-, right- and mix-based control would be ideal, but failing that, stereo-only would probably be the most set-and-forget configuration for my setup, if you find a way of making that work within the limitations of the hardware.
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