Picked up a super 8 in November and wow. It’s my dream synth. I’ve read in some forums that some people don’t care that much about binaural mode, but for me binaural mode on DDS2 with LFO 1 modulating binaural voices in 180 phase is just the cats whiskers. I absolutely love this synth. That said, I think there is a major missed opportunity regarding the binaural capabilities. Namely the ability to simply detune one side in relation to the other. If you have two voices panned L-R and detune one of them a few cents, the rub between the two pitches, starts to throb or “beat” to frequency. Hence the term binaural beats. The further one voice is from another, the greater the frequency of the binaural beats. Also the higher the pitch is the greater the frequency.
Most of the magic is in the subtle detuning, like less than 25 cents or so, at least to my ears. You can create gorgeous stereo images that are still very playable keys sound at less than 10 cents of detune.
Another very interesting feature of binaural beats is that they can create amazing spatial effects, that travel around your head or around the room in a 3 dimensional manner. Especially so at fine detune of less than 10 cents.
I understand that when George created these “binaural” synths he was referring to the architecture of two voices from start to finish, as opposed to a traditional monaural polysynth. But not including the rather simple feature of being able to detune one side of the binaural architecture from the other side seems to me to be a major oversight.
I’ll add that I have been able to create a patch that does binaural beats on the super 8, using the two layers, panning one layer to the left and the other to the right, and detuning one layer using the tune knob on dds 2, but it’s actually a huge waste of voices, turning the super 8 into only a 4 voice synth. And it’s not easy or intuitive to do. It’s definitely a work around. But it does yield the desired result.
That said, this should be something we can do on any of the binaural synths (including the super 6). It should be integrated into the binaural architecture and available with ease. I would love it if you could work this feature into a future update. It could be as simple as when you hit shift, the tune knob becomes binaural detune. Or even just when in binaural mode, the tune knob becomes binaural detune. It’s way more useful than detuning both voices together as far as I’m concerned. And it’s 100% on brand. PLEASE add this feature:)
