Wooster Audio has a digital delay/effects kit called the Space Baby. And it is awesome.
Like the Bleep Labs Nebulophone, it’s an Andromeda Space Rockers unit introduced at the recent Handmade Music Austin. It has the same iR sync mechanism as the Nebulophone.
The Space Baby has an adjustable delay, controllable feedback, a wet/dry mixer, and a ring modulator. The input and output are 1/4″ phono jacks, and the controls are four knobs. One of the knobs incorporates a button, which allows you to switch between five modes for that knob, which is cool and keeps down the number of controls required.
How does it work? The Space Baby is based on a PIC microcontroller which digitizes the input audio (a “Lo-fi 12 bit / 14 kHz analog/digital conversion” according to the website), uses a separate SRAM chip to cache and delay the audio before applying the filter and converting back to analog and sending through the amp and output jack.
The result can run from a simple echo/delay effect to full, feedback-heavy noise. Taken to their extremes, the ring modulator and feedback controls can take any input and transform it into a rich soundscape. It’s a little noisy, but this is not a delay unit for The Edge, it’s an electronic noise toy filter, and the noise is part of its character.
Since it doesn’t generate sound itself, the possibilities are limited only by the sound source you connect to it. I’ve been playing with my growing collection of noise toys – the Thingamagoop, Nebulophone, Bliptronic 5000, and the Loud Objects Noise Toy. And it sounds great – and entirely different – with each.
Here’s a sample with Think Geek’s Bliptronic 5000 being processed by the Space Baby.
The Space Baby has a programming header on it, and one can re-program the PIC. It has all the necessary components for a general digital signal processing (DSP) processor – input jack, analog-to-digital converter, processor, memory, digital-to-analog converter, amp, and output jack. Reprogramming could turn this device into any kind of audio filter. I may need to purchase one for filtering experiments.
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[...] Andromeda Space Rockers is a line of electronic noisemakers designed by Eric Archer, Bleep Labs, and Wooster Audio. I have built a couple Andromeda Space Rockers kits – the Nebulophone and Space Baby. [...]