Hardware Vintage mode mystery uncovered

I'm an electronics engineer and I just revealed the mystery around the analog 3000 circuit for you guys. I did so because I felt like akai where holding information back on this subject, while acting as if they like to have you involved in some development community. Which is ofcourse marketing strategy.

Anyway, the akai dude on youtube literally said they copied the exact 3000 circuit from the dacs to the jacks. So I went through the 3000 service manual to look up this piece of circuit, and found just what I thought.

The only thing thats in between the dacs and the jacks of a 3000 is an anti aliasing filter. Basically a two pole low pass filter without any resonance, and with its -3dB point at 26 KHz.

Nothing special, nothing to add any coloration. Just a lowpass filter outside of the audio region.

Dont believe the hype. Ever.

Ill add the plots:

Schematic:


Amplitude:


Phase:

Oh, the plots are from simulating the circuit on the pc.

Funk E-technician wrote:Dont believe the hype. Ever.

that´s what´s up!

Akai in marketing-hype shocker, surely not?

Good work though Funk. Interesting stuff, but I have a noob question. Even if the anti-aliasing filter is set at 26Khz will the circuitry still not affect lower frequencies?

In a sense that people will still run things through a Moog filter without actually using the cutoff/resonance.

Knew this was bullshit, glad I can see someone else verify this. Thanks for putting the time in.

thanks for taking the time to clear up something we've been asking about for close to a year now without ever getting a straight answer from anyone.

crossings wrote:thanks for taking the time to clear up something we've been asking about for close to a year now without ever getting a straight answer from anyone.

yes!

let's not make this thread disappear now by insulting anyone... we NEED this one to stay up on the board for good.

makes sense. But its still got the DAC though and that has to be a different to right, since it is an older design and this to would colour the sound to. I doubt they remade the same out dated DAC as well and use new DAC with software to emulate right?
So that is only half the picture then.
More work for you funky, and I like the phase degree plot of the filter response to, nice one.

I have checked it yesterday....I hear it over headphone when emulation is activated and also on my RME Fireface 800....its software based, not hardware. It would be nice when Akai could bring a firmware update out, where you can choose if you would like the emulation on the outs when MPC Software is not running. I think it should be possible see Focusrite DSP 24 Pro...

They backed off of the claim that the Ren had identical converters a while back.


Great work Funk E-technician.

moyphee wrote:They backed off of the claim that the Ren had identical converters a while back.


Great work Funk E-technician.

From what I remember, they never said it had the same convertors though! They said it was only the 1/4" output jacks from the 3000, just with new convertors. That in itself sounds like nothing special to me!

Patrick Dee wrote:I have checked it yesterday....I hear it over headphone when emulation is activated and also on my RME Fireface 800....its software based, not hardware. It would be nice when Akai could bring a firmware update out, where you can choose if you would like the emulation on the outs when MPC Software is not running. I think it should be possible see Focusrite DSP 24 Pro...

We are talking about the 3000 analog outs feature not the vintage modes feature.