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Comment by torusle | Hacker News Reader

The fun thing was the Roland Sync. You could sync up all the TB-303, TB-909 and all the others with a 5-pole DIN cable. The sync was badly implemented. It lagged, it had latency.

However!

As soon as you cabled all together their imperfections added up and they started to groove like nothing that has been heard before.

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This I don't understand. DINsync is raw trigger outputs/inputs like you'd have in a modular synth, in contrast to MIDI that has to send serial messages over a 1k data bus.

Perhaps this take has something to do with calling a five-pin DIN plug '5-pole'? Something's wrong and backwards here.

Again, I guess this is where we are now? I remember reality, but here we are.

No, this is different from pure CV. Each device has its own (digital) sequencer that can synchronize with others using pulse trains over DIN cable. Lots of places where latency and instability can occur!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIN_sync

DIN sync is not trigger based, it's a full clock protocol invented by Roland that has various different states. The fact is that not all DIN sync capable machines implement it the correct way, leading to slight differences in synchronisation, even between devices made by Roland.

Interesting, I'd be curious to read a technical analysis of the differences. DIN provides by far the tightest sync we've ever seen in hardware, so I question the idea that lag and latency are a defining feature of the protocol.

Owner of all (ALL!!) the classic Roland x0x boxes here, which are connected together using DIN Sync - the sync was not badly implemented at all - they sync together perfectly.

The sequencers in each of the machines have a bit of nuance, which is where that famous groove comes from!

You might be confusing this with the sometimes hilarious midi timing of the 909 and 707.

> 5-pole DIN cable. The sync was badly implemented. It lagged, it had latency.

Sounds like you are describing MIDI

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