Roland VP-330 Vocoder Plus revision sound comparison

[minime123]

hey guys,

just thought id take a quick break from work to share some interesting findings with you.

we are fully restoring a roland vp-330 mk1 and a roland vp-330 mk2 and ive been comparing the sound of the two. by full restoration, i mean full disassembly and cleaning inside and out and full servicing, which includes fixing every little problem, no matter how minute, as well as making improvements which will extend its reliability (such as replacing tons of caps - we do this especially when we see bulging and/or leakeage). the time invested in the mk2 machine, which came to us in relatively good working order yet still had problems (as usual), was around 37 hours, though that also included voltage conversion since this one came to us from a european seller. i have not calculated the time we spent on the mk1 unit yet.

anyway, the vp330 mk1 unit is signfiicantly noisier. also, percussive/consonant sounds picked up by the microphone trigger what id call high resonance transients - what you’d expect to hear if you patched those sounds through an envelope follower and patched the envelope follower voltage output into the cv in of a self oscillating lowpass resonant filter. these sounds go through to the output even when the keyboard isn’t being played. the female 4 foot setting seems significantly lower in volume than the male settings, so when played along with the male voices, it’s harder to hear than on the vp330 mk2 model. there’s a chance that some of these observations are not normal - we are going to compare this mk1 to another mk1 to be sure that what we’ve noticed is normal.

our overall impression of the sound is that this mk1 may be way noisier, as already stated, but sounds brighter and fuller than the mk2 machine. however, had we not made that side by side comparison, we wouldve been perfectly happy with the sound of the mk2 (!) as both instruments really sound great.

it will be interesting to compare the two mk1 machines to one another, but that probably wont happen for at least a few months as we have a lot of other items we need to prepare for customers right now.
i should also point out that its possible similar variations in sound may be present between two machines of any revision. we generally try our best to refrain from making side by side comparisons because it’s hard enough deciding which models to keep and which to sell - if we compare different revisions or even serial numbers of the same revisions side by side, we will likely end up having to keep multiples of every instrument we deal in (!). as it stands, im not sure which of these vp330s to keep and which to sell. we’ve had a similar dilemma with roland jupiter-4s. (first world problems!)

mini

ps ive got a bit of an email backlog, so if you emailed and have been waiting for a reply, please be patient - i should be caught up soon.

[smith toppleton]

Very interesting. I'd love to hear some sound samples of each one.