Moog Voyager / Minimonsta comparison

Out of nothing more then curiosity I wanted to know the fundamental differences between the Moog Voyager & Minimonsta. The filter is obvious so I didn’t even want to have that in the equation. I wanted to look at the raw building blocks, the oscillator waveforms. These are my results.

  1. 1.
    Voyager-saw
  2. 2.
    Minimonsta-saw
    0:04
  3. 3.
    Voyager-square
    0:04
  4. 4.
    Minimonsta-square
    0:04
  5. 5.
    Voyager-tri
    0:04
  6. 6.
    Minimonsta-tri
    0:04

Visuals

 

Voyager-Saw

Minimonsta -Saw

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Voyager-tri

Minimonsta-tri

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Voyager-Square

Minimonsta -Square

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The original test has the  filters set to wide open on both synths. I don’t think the original ever fully takes the filter out of the picture.  So with some further knob twiddling I have found if you add a little resonance  on  the voyager the wave shapes get pretty damn close.  I’m thinking the voyager just has a wider filter range.

Voyager Saw + filter res

Voyager Square + filter res

Eric Written by:

4 Comments

  1. May 24, 2009

    Thanks for the test, It is a big suprise how big the difrence is when I listen to it.

  2. TripACT
    June 5, 2009

    very nice job! interesting indeed!

  3. June 11, 2009

    Please note that the Minimonsta was modelled after an original Minimoog, not a Moog Voyager. You’ll find here some oscillator recordings of the Minimoog on which the Minimonsta is based on :
    http://ldesoras.free.fr/audio/minimoog-samples.zip

    Also: the square wave of our Minimoog was not exactly square (PW a bit off), and it seems that the various Minimoog out there have the same behaviour, but with different pulse width inaccuracies. Anyway we deliberately chose to emulate it with a PW of exactly 50 %.

  4. rhythminmind
    June 11, 2009

    Minimonsta is closer to the Model D for sure. I have found if I set the Voyager resonance to “2” the wave shapes are near identical between the two. I just added some new pic’s to show the results. All in all it’s noway a measure of quality. The Voyager, Model D, & Minimonsta can all make great moogesk sounds.

Comments are closed.