Ok just so it doesn’t look like I didn’t do any searching on my own, I did find the Godlike Productions transformer saturator algorithm as well as the documentation in the unofficial module reference. His implementation is more or less the same as what I was doing in testing out the parameters of the object, but I still feel like it’s missing some guardrails in order to make it musically useful. I’m wondering if there is a sweet spot of parameter ranges or an intended use for the object. Are there any official Eventide algorithms that use it?
I tend to leave the guardrails off unless I’m chasing a specific feature set for 2 main reasons. Firstly my own music (techo/trance/industrial) often gets tones from pushing things to the edge, or sometimes over the edge, and to this end, I wanted the ability to use the algorithm to distort. Pretty and musical is very much in the ears of the artist or audience, secondly I don’t want to make those decisions for other artists, though having said that, I do understand the value of something that always sounds good, and constraining the UI around that. I’m happy to put some guardrails in place for a version of the transformer saturator if you can provide some guidance of where you’d like it constrained, though as you are delving into VSIG, you could probably customize it for your own particular needs.
My own observations in working with this block are that area tends to impact the low frequency part of the signal. Larger areas tended to give better low frequency handling. Also, it depends a little bit on the application. Like physical circuits, transformers have a number of uses, from pure amplification (voltage step up and step down), to non-linear response (pushing into saturation), phase rotation (power factor correction for capacitative loads, though normally it’s inductive loads that need correcting), filtering (LC, LR and LCR filters), and probably not relevant to VSIG, isolation. Increasing turns (with a fixed ratio), tends to increase “power” handling, though you can drive it pretty hard before you get audible distortion. My algorithm needs input gain up around 40dB to distort (though if you reduce area and turn to very low values, it can distort at much lower levels).
Looking a the documentation in VSIG, the xformer block at its heart seems to consist of an integrator with flux passed to a differentiator (which makes sense). One approach to modelling transformers requires consideration of the voltage and amperage in the 2 coils, the core leakage and an assumption about the output load. I’m not sure what assumptions they have made on core losses or output load. If you want to reduce audible distortion, don’t put too much gain into the input, keep the area well above 1 (probably 5+) and turns above 1000. Saturation level will depend on if you want a clean amp (then set this to 1), or if you want colour (then set this lower).
Hope this provides some insight.
