Hard to believe but it looks like there’s a rather serious design flaw in Ray Wilson’s VC LFO. It’s here:
There’s a 100k pot with two 100k resistors connected to ±12 V; this gives the manual pulse width setting. There is also a PW control voltage, PWXV. Both go via 10k resistors into a comparator op amp. They serve as the reference voltage, so they determine the pulse width. There’s also a 1M to ground.
Okay, but what if the CV you want to use gives you too large a PW swing? You’d put it through an attenuator, right? (In fact my plan was to put an attenuator on the LFO front panel.) But now if you run the attenuator down to near minimum, the R37 wiper has a 20k path to ground, messing up the pulse width setting voltage divider. And: With PWXV floating, R58 and R34 form a voltage divider that reduces the PWC voltage a tiny bit… but if PWXV is grounded R34 is in parallel with R59 and V(PWC) gets cut in half!
What I find, then, is that if PWXV is floating, then the range of voltages going into the op amp is ±3.7 V, but if PWXV is grounded, that range drops to ±0.5 V!
(Incidentally, the schematic for SynthCube’s Eurorack version of this module has the PWXV jack tip normalled to ground. Wilson’s panel wiring doesn’t have that. If you do that then with no CV plugged in you have almost no manual pulse width range…)
The only reasonable fix I can come up with is to buffer PWXV and PWC to isolate each’s voltage divider from the other. The range would then be halved compared to if PWXV were floating, so maybe reduce R36 and R42 to say 20k to get some of that range back.
If I’m way off base on any of this please let me know…
