Digisound 80 Modular Synthesizer

The Digisound 80 Modular Synthesizer was a (largely) kit-built synthesizer designed, primarily, by Charles Blakey who ran a small family-owned company called Digisound Ltd near Blackpool in northern England.

Many of the early modules appeared as construction articles in two British electronics magazines – Electronics Today International (ETI) and Electronics & Music Maker (E&MM) in the early to mid 1980s.

via trontastic:

Here is a closer look at my Digisound 80 modular system. I’ve had this for about 20 years (just a box of bits in the beginning), Have built it up over the years.

If you’ve used the Digisound 80 Modular Synthesizer, leave a comment below!

Modules in the Digisound 80 range included:

• 80-1A Power Supply
• 80-2 VCO
• 80-3 LFO
• 80-4A Voltage Controlled Mixer
• 80-5 Processor
• 80-6L/B/H/P Low-Pass, Band-Pass, High-Pass, Phase-Shifting Filter
• 80-7A State-Variable (multimode) Filter
• 80-8 Basic ADSR
• 80-9A Dual VCA
• 80-10 Voltage-Controlled Envelope Generator
• 80-11A Dual Ring Modulator
• 80-12 Noise Generator With Sample & Hold.
• 80-13 External Input Module
• 80-14 Stereo Power Amplifier
• 80-15x various keyboards/accessories
• 80-15E X-Y Controller (joystick), Octave Shift, Touch Trigger
• 80-16 Dual Resonant Filters
• 80-17 Reverberation Unit
• 80-18 Multi-function Envelope Generator
• 80-19 Dual VCLFO
• 80-20A/B Waveform Multiplier (designed, I believe, by David Ward-Hunt of Wavestar)
• 80-21 Voltage Controlled Digital Oscillator
• 80-22 Patcher
• 80-23 Quad LFO
• 80-24 Polyphonic Keyboard Controller
• 80-C9 Voice Card.

Resources:

• Digisound 80 Modular Synthesizer history and overview
• The Digisound 80 Modular Synthesizer at Seb’s Synth-DIY pages
• Very nice Sound On Sound retrospective on the Digisound 80 Modular Synthesizer