Coron Drum Synthe RDS

basic imitation of SIMMONS SDS modules,sounds a bit straighter ,

It is pretty old and works flawlessly.

Coron? long gone

in a beautiful black two unit rack mount you have 2 voices, triggered by any switch pedal or audio or button on unit.basic2 osc(sinus to triangle linear) and noise with amp decay controls, enveloppe to inverse pitch(sweep) as usual in that kind of gear,noise filter and balance controls between osc and noise. a switch for click sound addition. regular SIMMONS brother. in the back , 2 audio ins,2out and switch inputs for choosing which voice (for each 2 channels)to play. Well built . sounds tight,can be quite punchy if you have adequat input (audio). Good old analog sound.

This is an old drum brain, containing two identical analog drum-synth units. You can trigger it with an appropriate signal (such as a trigger/tom sound from a drum machine). No midi, of course.
Getting satisfactory results is a little tricky, because emulating drum sounds requires a certain amount of experimentation and good sounds really result from a combination of very carefully set values.

Each of the two rows feature from left to right:
A hand trigger button and a trigger-led. Very helpful, indeed, especially in a rack set up like mine(Why is nothing audible? Which connection is wrong this time?). A sensivity knob (with the right setting of levels your drums sounds will be velocity sensitive). Two knobs for oscillator decay one and two; it's a bit like decay and release with standard ADSR-env's. A noise decay knob. A VCO-sweep amount (up or down). VCO -pitch. A wave mixer; sine vs. triangle. The good thing is that in the middle position both get fed out, which results in a higher output level and therefore in a higher kablooie- factor, if you know what i mean. Next thing is a click on -switch and an associated on- led (that is, it's off when the click is off and vice versa). A click amount would have been better, really. The click is so loud and annoying, you end up not using it at all. Whereby it must be said that a click would be of great use if only you could lower its level.
Next comes the noise filter, sounds like a 6 dB low resonance LowPass. Then there is a Osc vs. Noise mixer and finally the volume knob.
The end of the row sports two buttons: a mute button with associated on-led -if you switch the box on it's always muted at first. Hit this button and things should be fine.
The second button says MANUAL PRE-SET SELECT and there are a manual and a pre-set led. What i haven't mentioned,yet are those mini pots next to the big ones. With them you can "save" your favourite setting much in the same way a Yamaha CS-60 lets you "store" one voice.

Of course this thingie is best at producing analog drum sounds. Do I have to mention Roland- classics here? Well, maybe one: the TR-707.
It would be a good ally with this drum brain -your perfect sequencer.
Frankly, you won't be able to get a decent fake 808 bass drum out of it. But! It is of course capable of making the floor rumble with it's own massive kick sounds. The snares are very sweet analog ones and you get real close to the sound of a 909 snare. However they're the most tricky ones to program. Other than that you can work on more non-realistic sounds like a slowly up-sweeping bass drone. In fact the Osc goes so low you only hear clicks. You could also use the noise to get one such a drum box of old "HiHat"-sound.
And as mentioned earlier: it's velocity sensitive.

I think I've got it for more than a year now. no problems at all. Guess it's early to mid-eighties built , so...

The company is long gone.

Oh, I'd love to have a 808 of my own and /or a X-Base 09.
If you ever had your hands on one of those you know they're just perfect.
I've got a 606 and i love it so much.
I also like the 707, but that one is a different story.
The 808 really is the queen `cause every sound in it is just perfect.
Just the bass drum is impossible to sample. You could help yourself out with samples with all the other sounds, but not with the bass drum. Besides, samples are a pretty static affaire.
So the Coron Drum Synthe RDS comes to the rescue for those skint ones who are lucky enough to see it sitting around somewhere for sale. I also use a Tama 206 drum brain which I like a little better.
It sounds somehow "more right", rounder, sweeter, cleaner, something, I don't know. Doesn't make that 909 snare, though.
As a conclusion I'd state that the price paid(EUR 150, equals about the same in $) was neither a bargain nor a rip off; one shouldn't pay more, though.