The Transcendent T2000 synthesizer was a DIY synth, presented in a few issues of ETI in July and August 1978. The designer was Tim Orr and a complete kit was sold by Powertran.
It could be considered as the smallest siblings among the ETI synthesizers like the 3600, 4600 and big brother/sister 5600, but wasn’t really accepted into that range.
Well, others are better at telling the history so I tell mine.
The T2000 has ONE VCO, a VCF, VCA, Noise source, LFO and one AR for the VCF and a ADSR for the VCA. It also has a 37-key keyboard.
It is small portable and (spoiler alert) it makes great sounds … and it is simpel.
Actually I started looking into this one (and Radio Shacks Concertmate MG-1) four years ago as they both looked easy enuff to clone, but I brought home an MG-1 from USA a few years ago leaving the T2000 in the “tube”.
When we add a new project plan to our list we “put it in a tube” … a Swedish saying, at least.
First of all - I had a pretty good collection of various semiconductors requiring nothing (except the CD4006) for this one (I’ve got pretty much all semiconductors for the MG-1 as well) and I have nice program for making PCB layouts (Sprint-Layout 6.0). It’s an easy-to-use program where you can have a back-drop (a bitmap image of a PCB you want to clone). It is also a very basic program, but for simple projects it is absolutely perfect.
Some short notes on the process and my progress.
I did start layouting the … layout a few times but ran into some problems as I had to (digitally) glue together pieces of the original board and somewhere was half an inch missing. Also the switches were not to be found anywhere and trying to fit an ordinary 2-pole 3-way toggle switch became a problem for me. So I made some attempts, lost interest, probably deleted half-finished work.
The final attack on the summit started early this Fall and with help from nice fellas, among them Telefunkian who has made a series of Youtube-videos, I could fill in the missing pieces, reach the peak and plant a Swedish flag on the top of Tarakoram-2000.
I even did check the PCB for errors several times before shipping the gerber-files to JLCPCB.
Normally when I loose my head, I start out grandiously, presenting a MEGA-project and then I sort of loose steam pressure and stall and leave yet another great but unfinished project behind me. This time I will try to get myself together and see if I can finish this one through, sharing experiences, photos and frustration (and noise) with you.
Have to fix me something to eat, but here’s the ETI articles on the machine: Transcendent T2000.pdf.
OK! OK! OK! Here’s a picture …
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