I think I may have just fallen in love with Noise Engineering over their deep dive blog about the curse of the Imitor Versio:
Once we ironed out the details, we dove headfirst into development… which is when we discovered the curse of IV. First, the panels came back wrong: the first batch of panels we ordered when we thought we could go into production came back with unexplainable issues and we had to reprint at the last minute [ed. note: by unexplainable, Markus means there was a typo in the file that somehow ALL OF US missed]. Then, we sent a preproduction proto that we hadn’t tested well to Patrick O’Brien so he could film the demo video for it, but one of the audio jacks didn’t work very well. Stephen went to drop a replacement unit on POB’s porch… but on the way his tire blew and he had to go get four new tires, making this the most personally expensive module we’ve made.
During test, Kris hadn’t actually played with IV much as she was swamped with other things, so that was left to the rest of the team. The night before launch, she plugged it in for the first time and IMMEDIATELY found a reasonably large but hard-to-reproduce bug. We rushed to patch it in time for the firmware to go public before the release deadline.
Basically, be careful when you’re using IV: it’s a little bit evil and maybe definitely a lot cursed. Maybe it’s got something to do with that pyramid on the panel?
I appreciate this hilarious look behind the scenes because who hasn’t had this sort of thing happen to them? There’s also a bit of backstory about how the failure to bring the original vision of the Imitor Versio to fruition ended up being a real boon to customers since this ended up on the Versio platform. For those not familiar with this concept, any Versio Noise Engineering module can be reflashed with different hardware (and other faceplates can be installed) making this an, umm, modular module. It looks like Noise Engineering is even supporting DIY firmware creation so this is going to get pretty interesting as an extensible DSP platform.
As for the Imitor Versio itself, it looks like I’m a big delay nerd and think this might be my next purchase. My favorite feature about the Imitor Versio is how they have managed to create such intuitive and hands-on controls for a whopping 12 delay taps. Rather than going the tedious route of controlling each tap individually (sorry Rainmaker), clever parameters apply to all the taps and accomplish some fairly complex things like accelerating/decelerating delay times, crescendo/diminuendo (Noise Engineering calls this ‘decrescendo’ so I guess they didn’t go to one year of community college music classes like your highly educated author here), and stereo tap panning.
If you haven’t already, be sure to read the rest of the deep dive about Imitor Versio or at least peep the videos.