From tande.adamson@btinternet.com Sun Nov 01 17:38:43 2009
Subject:The Ventilator: A descriptive impression of what it appears to do.

I wonder whether the following will perhaps describe to those who have not had the opportunity to try out a Ventilator, what the Ventilator appears to do? I have written 'appears' as it's probably not how it actually achieves its result.

Not so long ago if you wanted to mimic the sound of a violin, sax, clarinet, strings or piano say, the only way to do this was to use an analog synth or Melotron.
Some synths, built into home organs for example made a decent stab at making imitation instruments'sounds with varying degrees of success. The Casio CZ100 did a great job of imitating a human whistle. The Wurlitzer home organ had a great analog gipsy violin on its Orbit synth.

However it wasn't until the advent of sampling that anybody at all could definitely tell what 'instrument' was being played. As time went on when more sampled memory became available, and with greater expertise, electronic instrument makers produced instruments with astonishingly realistic copy instruments.

Well the Ventilator appears to have done the same kind of thing with the Leslie cabinet.
It's as if the Leslie cabinet and it's warm tube amp has been sampled, including every last one of its attributes, the ramp up and down, tone, horn resonance, cabinet resonance, frequency modulation and amplitude modulation, mic'd near to and away from the cabinet.

Unlike sampled instruments, obviously the ventilator doesn't produce its own sound, but rather, it accurately alters the incoming audio signal, to mimic a real cabinet's effect on incoming audio signals as relayed by three mics to a stereo amp. So you get a kind of sampled Leslie'd organ sound but without any of the artifacts you get when playing actual sampled Leslie sounds as found on modern keyboard patches, or without having to resort to the E-MU B-3 type crossfades for example.

It's hard to get across how extraordinary the Ventilator is, but I've written the above in response to Mike's earlier question.. Ventilator or CLS222?
Thomas.