Doepfer A-110-1

When I first became interested in modular synthesis I bought one of these, and liked it so much I bought another! The A-110 is probably the cheapest vco available, but delivers a decent audio performance, and offers a wide sound palette. It is saw-wave based, and offers another three wave shapes: sine , pulse and triangle. CV baed modulation of frequency and pulse width is available. According to the manual, the sine and triangle waveforms are not true, but derived from the saw wave. In practice all the waveforms sounded good to me. A pair of A-110's track very well together, and deliver good hard sync and FM results.

Other things I liked about the A-110:
* it was well calibrated on delivery and it achieves stable tuning within 5 minutes.
* At 10HP it is perhaps wider than it needs to be, but the control knobs are easy to use.

Room for improvement:
* The fine tuning range is not enough to tune one A-110 a musical interval above another vco, for instance a 4th or a 5th. I understand that there is a modification that can be made to the circuit board, but I feel the module should come set up this way.
* The A-110 cycles down to 15hz, which is not quite low enough to act as an LFO.

However, for the price this VCO is an absolute bargain. I bought the A-110 as a 'starter' vco, thinking I would sell or trade it when I could afford a more expensive vco. Instead I kept it, and bought another.

The A-110 is a voltage-controlled oscillator for eurorack modular. It can produce four waveforms simultaneously: square, sawtooth, triangle, and sine wave.Its a no frills basic oscilator but its waveforms sound great, I would describe the sound as warm and punchy and has that great analog sound that you just cant replicate with VST's .
This vco has a frequency range of about eight octaves and it seemed to track very well and stay in tune. I found that if you let it warm up for about 20 minutes the tuning will not drift .
The Doepfer A-110 also has pulse width modulation for the square wave that you can control via CV or by hand it tends to fatten up the sound and give some movement but I find its uses a fairly limited .
If your starting out on your modular journey an oscillator is a major part of sound generation in an east coast (moog style ) modular system , I would recommend this module without hesitation not for the features but for its classic sound . In fact get two and detune one slightly for that super fat sound .