Warning: Very long rant ahead. Religious conversion is always a dicey topic but I’m willing to give it a try.
I’ve been building a small Eurorack system since early last year. I have about 11 modules built with another four in the queue.
Last Saturday at the Cornell Moog thing I was talking with Trevor Pinch and mentioned building Eurorack, and his immediate response was, “The trouble with Eurorack is, the knobs are too small.” Well, that’s hardly a revelation, and in fact I agreed immediately. But his saying that kind of stimulated me to thinking, as have a thread or two here recently.
There’s a kind of cult of slenderness in the Eurorack community. Come out with a 12HP module and people will complain. Shrink it down to 6HP and they’ll revere you. There’s a whole company devoted exclusively to 2HP modules.
And of course there are benefits to making your modules as narrow as possible, because you can fit more modules in a given volume, and that’s good if your studio or bedroom or wherever your synth lives is small or if you’re hauling your module around to gigs. But the Eurorack folks often seem to worship narrowness without acknowledging its downsides. First, the aesthetic: a system of 3U, 4HP modules doesn’t create an impressive visual display (unless there are, like, hundreds of modules). Can you imagine Keith Emerson on stage in front of a Eurorack case? Me neither. Second, the practical: tiny knobs closely spaced are hard to work with. For instance, I have a 3-channel mixer with Davies 1900H clone knobs on 20 mm centers. It’s practically impossible to simultaneously turn two adjacent channels from min to max or worse yet, one min to max and the other max to min. Your hands are basically on top of one another with your fingers colliding.
This sort of thinking leads to questions of, should I change formats? That’s a fraught thing. For one thing, you’ve made some kind of investment in one format and you hate to lose that. That’s particularly relevant if the change is to a format whose signal and/or control voltage conventions differ.
To my understanding that’s not the case between Eurorack and Kosmo, and you can freely plug modules of one format into modules of the other provided you have a way to go between 1/4" and 3.5 mm jacks and plugs. And Kosmo uses a ±12V power supply, like Eurorack and unlike most other formats, and even uses the Eurorack power header (in the 10-pin, non 5V form).
That makes interoperability fairly easy. It also allows one to leverage one of Eurorack’s main advantages: The availability of many, many DIY modules. On modulargrid.net there’s something like 18 times as many DIY Eurorack modules listed as the next highest format (which is Serge). Electrically, a Eurorack module is indistinguishable from a Kosmo module. It’s only the panel size and jack size that differ. It requires some work but should be very feasible to take just about any DIY Eurorack module PCB and repanel it as Kosmo. From that point of view the number of DIY Kosmo modules available at this writing isn’t 4 but 1877.
Repaneling takes effort, but can be seen as an opportunity. Not only an opportunity to replace small knobs with large and tight spacing with expansive, but to impose your own uniform aesthetic on the synth. Rather than a hodgepodge of different makers’ choices of colors, knob styles, fonts, and so on, you can end up with something more like, say, a classic Moog modular: A whole system with a unified appearance.
It’s also an opportunity to standardize. If you’re building modules with panel components mounted on PC boards, as in many Eurorack modules, then you’re forced to use panel components whose footprint matches the designers’ choices. You might need six of this jack for one module, four of that jack for another, and five of another jack for a third. Repaneling means moving the panel components off board — or creating your own panel PCB for them to reside on — and that means you can bulk buy your favorite jacks and use them everywhere.
Knobs too. You can design panels for a limited number of knob sizes and styles to be used everywhere, and then buy knobs in bulk. Maybe not the kind of bulk LMNC just did, but bulk.
One more benefit of switching: You’re stepping off the beaten path, and that’s liberating. You’re not operating according to any majority’s expectations. The module that’s the latest must-have thing over on the Eurorack side, you can safely ignore unless you really want it. Building Kosmo tells the world you have your own road and you like it that way.
My present Eurorack case is basically full and I’m contemplating what to build to house my next modules, so if I were to change formats, the time to do so is just about here. A week or so ago my thinking was that while I appreciate the appeal, I probably wouldn’t ever switch away from Eurorack to a larger format partly because of my investment in Eurorack so far and partly because I don’t have a ton of space for a larger system. But the past few days of thinking about it have me on the edge of deciding to change over to Kosmo. I can still use my investment, and as for space, I can find it. And it’s not as if I’m gigging with a modular. The downsides of there being no commercially available built modules or full kits and very few commercially available panel and PCB sets aren’t that significant. The benefits of having something more playable, more in line with my aesthetic, and more uniform in construction are important ones. Maybe I’ve overlooked some serious drawback, but I begin to think switching is an attractive proposition.
