> But I don’t think it is impossible to build an 808 that would not fool even the most seasoned experts.
Whoah, double negative there
Whoah, double negative there
"I think it's possible to build an 808 clone that would fool even the most seasoned experts."
I'm 100% sure about that since a junction generating noise is just a junction generating noise: color is added by filtering/clipping afterwards. One transistor can be much noisier than others but other stages would compensate level differences anyway. To me the only requirement for building a 808 clone that sounds just as the original is to put it in the same original enclosure; psychology plays a role here: if you put the original 808 circuit into a modern enclosure some people will tell it's a clone and sounds different. I wish I had time and money to make a blind test because I'm totally sure most people, including experts, would be fooled both by a clone in the original case and by the original circuit put in a different enclosure.
For me, Im most interested in the clap, ch, oh, and cy sounds. Those are the most unique sounding to me among analog drum sounds. The hi hat and cymbal sounds are remarkably complex and everything else Ive heard sounds too much like a metallic pulse followed by white/pink noise. The 808 is not necessarily realistic sounding but it is very cool sounding to my ears. The bass drum, which is mainly what made the 808 so popular in the first place, is now pretty easily duplicated or sampled with other synthesis types, but the 808 kick is unique in that it is more a (near)self oscillating filter controlled by an envelope than a pulse followed by sine wave that other analog kicks use. This definitely contributes to its less static, more bouncy kick drum sound, especially at longer decay settings. Its pretty cool that you can program a pattern and on the first pass, subsequent kicks will add to each other, and then the next time around, they cancel each other. This combined with accent can create some very live feeling patterns, and this is a very underrated feature of the 808.
Especially the voicing board schematics is simpler than the 808 one. Interestingly they used a shift register for noise while cymbals are still made using dissonant oscillators with cmos gates. The schematic though is much easier to read and understand. That drum machine sounded close enough to the 808 to gain its share of popularity when a couple decades after that sound became mainstream, and of course I was stupid enough to sell mine for cheap just before that moment.