31 ms·

Stompenberg FX: Demo and play over 150 pedals live via the internet

160 points by Chirono 6y ago

tpmx 6y ago
The idea and the execution is seriously innovative and impressive. (After troubleshooting a local issue with a failing USB microphone I can verify that the live mode works great. This is the real deal.) Don't miss the photos of the physical setup from the gallery features to the right of the pedal detail pages; excerpt: https://im.static-thomann.de/pics/images/stompenberg/backstage/stompenberg_4-big.png https://im.static-thomann.de/pics/images/stompenberg/backsta... https://im.static-thomann.de/pics/images/stompenberg/backstage/stompenberg_5-big.png https://im.static-thomann.de/pics/images/stompenberg/backsta... https://im.static-thomann.de/pics/images/stompenberg/backstage/stompenberg_6-big.png https://im.static-thomann.de/pics/images/stompenberg/backsta... It's Raspberry Pi-based. Can anyone identify that presumably audio add-on board with lots of connectors? Perhaps it's a one-off inhouse design.
- deelowe 6y ago
  Looks custom. That's quite a board sitting on top. https://im.static-thomann.de/pics/images/stompenberg/backstage/2.jpg https://im.static-thomann.de/pics/images/stompenberg/backsta...
  - tpmx 6y ago
    Yikes.
    - deelowe 6y ago
      Yeah. Makes you wonder why the PI was even needed.
      - tpmx 6y ago
        Well, it's a well-engineered, -documented, and -supported stable platform to handle computing needs for that giant board. Makes perfect sense, I think.
        deelowe 6y ago
        I know. I was making a bit of a joke. It's a very impressive build. ;-)
      - unmasked_poker 6y ago
        The PI is needed for bridging our PCM3060 based custom sound card(via hardware i2s) with a WebRTC client that connects to the customer. It also handles all the high end internet connectivity and allows us to easily flash the microcontrollers with new software. It could have been done with audiointerfaces instead, but this approach is truly modular and allows us to scale it easily.
- RedCapybara 6y ago
  It's a inhouse design with a PCM3060 as audio codec.
  - tpmx 6y ago
    After doing my research: Thomann is a very large reseller (1700 employees according to wikipedia) in musical equipment. What's the story behind how a reseller got into designing custom raspberry pi add-on boards to demo third party pedals online?
    - nightvisi0n 6y ago
      According to their blog posts it was a contract work by another company: https://feinarbyte.de/projekte/stompenberg/ https://feinarbyte.de/projekte/stompenberg/ (german site)
      - ratww 6y ago
        Their name seems to be a pun on "Feinarbeit", or "fine work". I love how Germany is full of those small, super-specialised tech companies.
    - squarefoot 6y ago
      They also are behind the design of Harley Benton branded instruments, which are made in China although under a decent quality control. I have two HB 5 string basses, the former was the bare minimum I could afford to move to the 5 strings world and see how I adapted to it. That bass wasn't great but it was well set up and tuned, had a decent neck binding, the electronic was really quiet and the sound, although a bit rubber-ish and lacking some sustain, was good enough for playing in a band in which the guitarist played gear that cost 10 times more without anyone noticing. One year later I purchased one of their HBZ-2005, which besides being a piece of beauty sounds fantastic. I paid it about 220€ years ago, before they bumped the price to about 300€ - bummer, I was considering the purchase of a spare one. Apparently it was too good to be that cheap.
      - 6y ago
rbinv 6y ago
More details here: https://www.thomann.de/blog/en/stompenberg-fx-speaker-simulator-update/ https://www.thomann.de/blog/en/stompenberg-fx-speaker-simula...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
Tade0 6y ago
Hats off to those who came up with this and convinced their superiors that it's worth trying. Most pedal demos don't give a very good idea how something will sound with your setup, because well, they're using their own, filtered through speakers and microphones at that.
- diggan 6y ago
  You can turn off the speaker simulation + route your own setup in the "live" mode. I gave it a quick try and seems to work quite well, although the latency is quite annoying. But it's a demo, not performance tool after all.
  - RedCapybara 6y ago
    They are self hosted in southern Germany and you connect via WebRTC, so if you are far away from there it will have additional latency, sorry no way around it.
    - diggan 6y ago
      I'm in Spain so probably closer than most others here on HN, the latency is really not that bad. Seems you're related to Thomann/Stompenberg, so just wanted to thank you for this service! Will certainly help me in finding pedals without having to go through the buy/sell process I'm currently doing.
      - RedCapybara 6y ago
        Glad you like it! Thanks!
mutagen 6y ago
This is genius and makes me wonder why I didn't think of it. Edit: they already thought of that!
ericwood 6y ago
I have so many questions as to how they're handling controlling knob changes! From the pictures it looks like they've yanked the pots out and hooked the boards up to their rig, which raises more questions. This is something I've tried myself, and it's not trivial. Digipots won't work in the signal path and are noisy and imprecise, so companies that do this (there are very few!) like Chase Bliss use vactrols. Using those precisely is still tricky, as pot values in many circuits are all over the place and have different tapers, whereas most vactrols have a voltage/resistance curve that looks more logarithmic. Would love more information on this, as it's a topic that's difficult to research.
- diggan 6y ago
  This is the only snippet of information I could find about it. Seems indeed like noise and imprecision would be issues even if replacing the knobs and switches, the imprecision you could live with as it's a demo, but the noise certainly is not wanted. > The first step is to dismantle them, measure the potentiometers and replace them with digital potentiometers and switches. https://www.thomann.de/blog/en/stompenberg-fx-speaker-simulator-update/ https://www.thomann.de/blog/en/stompenberg-fx-speaker-simula...
- RedCapybara 6y ago
  Most of them are controlled with Digipots, but yeah indeed it was not easy to get it working for all the different setups.
  - ericwood 6y ago
    Did you run into noise issues? I actually haven't tried a digipot in a signal path (they do work great for other controls like LFOs and the delay time on a PT2399), but everything I've read online has told me to avoid it. I'm not hearing any in the demos so clearly it's workable!
    - RedCapybara 6y ago
      Many many problems (several revisions), but I cannot go into them, because fortunately I was not part of the hardware design team. Definitely nothing I would recommend as part time project.
nightvisi0n 6y ago
There's also a video showcasing this project over at their synth channel at youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lBYRQUTzYk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lBYRQUTzYk
- anotheryou 6y ago
  He talks crap. Housing staid on and what you see is just the control boards...
codetrotter 6y ago
I wanted to do the same with hardware synthesizers, and was planning on calling the service SynthCloud but that name was already taken by someone else doing something else, and that’s my excuse :p
navbaker 6y ago
Is there some mute button I'm missing? I've tried with both Chrome and Edge to play the pre-recorded riffs for a few different pedals and am not getting any sound. I verified I have volume on my end with a youtube video.
- fpgaminer 6y ago
  Same problem; I had to refresh the page to get it working.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
RileyJames 6y ago
I started on a project of this nature about 2 years ago. So cool that they've follow through. My method was to have users record samples, re-amp them through each pedal, record the output and then make that available back to the user. It wasn't live/realtime. And the pedal setting has to be pre-defined. It worked, but it was limited. My intention was to use it for rare / vintage / analog pedals. Fun project, but this execution is waaaaay better. Very glad someone got it.
pta2002 6y ago
This is an absolutely amazing tool and is one of the main reasons I keep buying stuff from Thomann - I'm looking at a pedal, see the little Stompenberg FX demo popup and I can try it out right from my home! It's great and has definitely directly influenced some of my purchases. Hope they never get rid of it!
dharma1 6y ago
There’s a couple of similar SaaS services for analog studio equipment - https://mixanalog.com https://mixanalog.com (also has a couple of analog reel to reels) https://accessanalog.com https://accessanalog.com Both really good if you want full remote access to analog studio hardware worth thousands that you don’t use often enough to buy. You can also use multiple together and chain them however you want If there was an open source hardware/software solution for this, or some kind of easy to use platform for people to list their gear, I think a lot of people would “rent” their gear online
Bad_CRC 6y ago
Wow this is awesome, as an IT guy working with webrtc/voip, a hobbyist guitar player and electronic aficionado this looks amazing. Kudos to all the team working on this.

160 points by Chirono 6y ago

tpmx 6y ago

The idea and the execution is seriously innovative and impressive. (After troubleshooting a local issue with a failing USB microphone I can verify that the live mode works great. This is the real deal.) Don't miss the photos of the physical setup from the gallery features to the right of the pedal detail pages; excerpt: https://im.static-thomann.de/pics/images/stompenberg/backstage/stompenberg_4-big.png https://im.static-thomann.de/pics/images/stompenberg/backsta... https://im.static-thomann.de/pics/images/stompenberg/backstage/stompenberg_5-big.png https://im.static-thomann.de/pics/images/stompenberg/backsta... https://im.static-thomann.de/pics/images/stompenberg/backstage/stompenberg_6-big.png https://im.static-thomann.de/pics/images/stompenberg/backsta... It's Raspberry Pi-based. Can anyone identify that presumably audio add-on board with lots of connectors? Perhaps it's a one-off inhouse design.

deelowe 6y ago
Looks custom. That's quite a board sitting on top. https://im.static-thomann.de/pics/images/stompenberg/backstage/2.jpg https://im.static-thomann.de/pics/images/stompenberg/backsta...
- tpmx 6y ago
  Yikes.
  - deelowe 6y ago
    Yeah. Makes you wonder why the PI was even needed.
    - tpmx 6y ago
      Well, it's a well-engineered, -documented, and -supported stable platform to handle computing needs for that giant board. Makes perfect sense, I think.
      - deelowe 6y ago
        I know. I was making a bit of a joke. It's a very impressive build. ;-)
    - unmasked_poker 6y ago
      The PI is needed for bridging our PCM3060 based custom sound card(via hardware i2s) with a WebRTC client that connects to the customer. It also handles all the high end internet connectivity and allows us to easily flash the microcontrollers with new software. It could have been done with audiointerfaces instead, but this approach is truly modular and allows us to scale it easily.
RedCapybara 6y ago
It's a inhouse design with a PCM3060 as audio codec.
- tpmx 6y ago
  After doing my research: Thomann is a very large reseller (1700 employees according to wikipedia) in musical equipment. What's the story behind how a reseller got into designing custom raspberry pi add-on boards to demo third party pedals online?
  - nightvisi0n 6y ago
    According to their blog posts it was a contract work by another company: https://feinarbyte.de/projekte/stompenberg/ https://feinarbyte.de/projekte/stompenberg/ (german site)
    - ratww 6y ago
      Their name seems to be a pun on "Feinarbeit", or "fine work". I love how Germany is full of those small, super-specialised tech companies.
  - squarefoot 6y ago
    They also are behind the design of Harley Benton branded instruments, which are made in China although under a decent quality control. I have two HB 5 string basses, the former was the bare minimum I could afford to move to the 5 strings world and see how I adapted to it. That bass wasn't great but it was well set up and tuned, had a decent neck binding, the electronic was really quiet and the sound, although a bit rubber-ish and lacking some sustain, was good enough for playing in a band in which the guitarist played gear that cost 10 times more without anyone noticing. One year later I purchased one of their HBZ-2005, which besides being a piece of beauty sounds fantastic. I paid it about 220€ years ago, before they bumped the price to about 300€ - bummer, I was considering the purchase of a spare one. Apparently it was too good to be that cheap.
    - 6y ago

rbinv 6y ago

More details here: https://www.thomann.de/blog/en/stompenberg-fx-speaker-simulator-update/ https://www.thomann.de/blog/en/stompenberg-fx-speaker-simula...

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

Tade0 6y ago

Hats off to those who came up with this and convinced their superiors that it's worth trying. Most pedal demos don't give a very good idea how something will sound with your setup, because well, they're using their own, filtered through speakers and microphones at that.

diggan 6y ago
You can turn off the speaker simulation + route your own setup in the "live" mode. I gave it a quick try and seems to work quite well, although the latency is quite annoying. But it's a demo, not performance tool after all.
- RedCapybara 6y ago
  They are self hosted in southern Germany and you connect via WebRTC, so if you are far away from there it will have additional latency, sorry no way around it.
  - diggan 6y ago
    I'm in Spain so probably closer than most others here on HN, the latency is really not that bad. Seems you're related to Thomann/Stompenberg, so just wanted to thank you for this service! Will certainly help me in finding pedals without having to go through the buy/sell process I'm currently doing.
    - RedCapybara 6y ago
      Glad you like it! Thanks!

mutagen 6y ago

This is genius and makes me wonder why I didn't think of it. Edit: they already thought of that!

ericwood 6y ago

I have so many questions as to how they're handling controlling knob changes! From the pictures it looks like they've yanked the pots out and hooked the boards up to their rig, which raises more questions. This is something I've tried myself, and it's not trivial. Digipots won't work in the signal path and are noisy and imprecise, so companies that do this (there are very few!) like Chase Bliss use vactrols. Using those precisely is still tricky, as pot values in many circuits are all over the place and have different tapers, whereas most vactrols have a voltage/resistance curve that looks more logarithmic. Would love more information on this, as it's a topic that's difficult to research.

diggan 6y ago
This is the only snippet of information I could find about it. Seems indeed like noise and imprecision would be issues even if replacing the knobs and switches, the imprecision you could live with as it's a demo, but the noise certainly is not wanted. > The first step is to dismantle them, measure the potentiometers and replace them with digital potentiometers and switches. https://www.thomann.de/blog/en/stompenberg-fx-speaker-simulator-update/ https://www.thomann.de/blog/en/stompenberg-fx-speaker-simula...
RedCapybara 6y ago
Most of them are controlled with Digipots, but yeah indeed it was not easy to get it working for all the different setups.
- ericwood 6y ago
  Did you run into noise issues? I actually haven't tried a digipot in a signal path (they do work great for other controls like LFOs and the delay time on a PT2399), but everything I've read online has told me to avoid it. I'm not hearing any in the demos so clearly it's workable!
  - RedCapybara 6y ago
    Many many problems (several revisions), but I cannot go into them, because fortunately I was not part of the hardware design team. Definitely nothing I would recommend as part time project.

nightvisi0n 6y ago

There's also a video showcasing this project over at their synth channel at youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lBYRQUTzYk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lBYRQUTzYk

anotheryou 6y ago
He talks crap. Housing staid on and what you see is just the control boards...

codetrotter 6y ago

I wanted to do the same with hardware synthesizers, and was planning on calling the service SynthCloud but that name was already taken by someone else doing something else, and that’s my excuse :p

navbaker 6y ago

Is there some mute button I'm missing? I've tried with both Chrome and Edge to play the pre-recorded riffs for a few different pedals and am not getting any sound. I verified I have volume on my end with a youtube video.

fpgaminer 6y ago
Same problem; I had to refresh the page to get it working.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

RileyJames 6y ago

I started on a project of this nature about 2 years ago. So cool that they've follow through. My method was to have users record samples, re-amp them through each pedal, record the output and then make that available back to the user. It wasn't live/realtime. And the pedal setting has to be pre-defined. It worked, but it was limited. My intention was to use it for rare / vintage / analog pedals. Fun project, but this execution is waaaaay better. Very glad someone got it.

pta2002 6y ago

This is an absolutely amazing tool and is one of the main reasons I keep buying stuff from Thomann - I'm looking at a pedal, see the little Stompenberg FX demo popup and I can try it out right from my home! It's great and has definitely directly influenced some of my purchases. Hope they never get rid of it!

dharma1 6y ago

There’s a couple of similar SaaS services for analog studio equipment - https://mixanalog.com https://mixanalog.com (also has a couple of analog reel to reels) https://accessanalog.com https://accessanalog.com Both really good if you want full remote access to analog studio hardware worth thousands that you don’t use often enough to buy. You can also use multiple together and chain them however you want If there was an open source hardware/software solution for this, or some kind of easy to use platform for people to list their gear, I think a lot of people would “rent” their gear online

Bad_CRC 6y ago

Wow this is awesome, as an IT guy working with webrtc/voip, a hobbyist guitar player and electronic aficionado this looks amazing. Kudos to all the team working on this.