GR-MEGA production status, GR-1 firmware progress, Integral firmware 3.1

It’s been a while since our last news letter, so we figured you guys could do with an update.

On the GR-MEGA production front there’s good news and bad.

The bad news is a bunch of the first 20 units seem to suffer from an electrical issue that has remained well-hidden, but started manifesting itself recently out there with a couple of users. It depends a lot on your electrical environment. The GR-MEGA is totally stable with just just headphones and a MIDI keyboard hooked up, but the problems appear (sporadically) when you connect grounded equipment like other synths and audio interfaces via the phono jacks. The audio may become mute, and you’ll have to shutdown and restart. We reiterate that this is a sporadic issue. You typically need to touch another grounded surface (like a Macbook) while plugging in the phono connector. The HDMI port has the same problem, and can even cause the unit to freeze, requiring unplugging the power, and restarting. This is also a sporadic problem, and depends a lot on your studio. We have 3 setups in our workshop, and only with 1 of them did problems occur.. and we suspected prototype soldering.. This is why it remained hidden to us for so long.

The good news is that we can fix this problem, and we can patch up your unit free of charge, of course. If you are one of the first 20 users (serial number below 0020), please contact us at info@tastychips.nl. The patch does take an hour or two to perform. These units were all shipped out in July and August.

Other good news is that firmware GR-MEGA 1.1.3 seems to be stable. We’re logging bug reports from users, but since 1.1 there have not been truly major problems. If you’re a user and have something to report, get in touch via info@tastychips.nl. Version 1.1.4, offering various small bug fixes is already out: check out our firmware section on our support page. Version 1.1.5 is already being prepared.. 🙂

New GR-MEGA’s should become available near the start of October, and this will include the first BLACK ones! We can’t wait to show you the first photos!

Please know that you can always look up when your order will be ready in our production table. We’re regularly updating it.

Step 1: get your order number from the email from our webshop. This is a number like #12xxxx, for instance #121345.

Step 2: Head to GR-MEGA Support Page

Step 3: Look in what block your order number falls. In our example case #121345, the number is in the range 121218-121545. This corresponds with early December.

Meanwhile, there’s been solid progress on the GR-1 firmware 3.0.. but it hasn’t been easy. To get proper performance without crackles on USB audio interfaces, we need to go back to an 8 year old version of the Linux, which is no longer supported, with closed-source libraries, and port all our brand new firmware from the GR-MEGA in a really cumbersome way, rolling everything into a static ball, requiring all kinds of obscure replacements for runtime library calls. 🤓 Yeah, that’s technical lingo for this is going to take longer than we thought. It’s unfortunate, because everything was looking sunny, until USB audio support came along.. as usual. But well, we feel that at least it’s going to get done. A breakthrough is pretty close.

Integral firmware 3.1 had a couple of iterations between testing and development, and we now think we got a serious candidate. The release is scheduled for the end of the month. New features include: USB MIDI support (switching presets), sample reversal, noise gate (for super high resonant impulses), and swapping the list order internal <-> USB.

The Integral is sold out, but a new batch should arrive early November. The GR-1 remains directly available.