Vintage Analog Audio Corner

I’m making very slow progress recently with my modules, so here is a little side thread that might be of interest.

The EKU 1030 was a very early product (1969/70) from the company I am working for.
It was almost a modular synthesizer. It had a tone generator, mic/line inputs, a ringmodulator, a gate,
a mixer, a patchbay and an output amplifier.

Only very few were built, mainly for the german state broadcasters SWF(now SWR) and WDR that had set up experimental music studios in Freiburg and Cologne.
These devices and others made by our company were used there by modern composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen (specifically for his piece “Mantra” where it was called “Modul 69 B”), Luigi Nono, Pierre Boulez and others.

I’m proud to be part of this company for almost 15 years now. Sadly I’m one of the very few who has a soft spot for vintage analog equipment and for experimental electronic music. Nowadays, my work is all about logfiles, firmware updates, and multicast streams.

There was a EKU 1030 Rack stored in a basement, but it’s gone and I’m afraid it was thrown into the big electronic trash bin.

Would have been a perfect item for Sam’s museum, but it’s as rare as a rocking horse manure.
At least I have saved the schematics.

8 Likes

Klein & Hummel OY

Just finished the repair of these 2 babies. So happy I have them working again. These were the first active studio monitor speakers ever. I think mine are at least 40 years old by now and they sound absolutely marvelous :heart_eyes:

2 Likes

Had to improvise a bit with the big capacitors and mount them a little differently.

1 Like

Hi! I am working on a paper about the use of ring modulators in electronic music, and some colleagues are looking at Mantra as a case study. Would it be possible to share the schematics of the EKU 1030?