Powertran Transcendent 2000, courtesy of Matrixsynth
A monophonic analog synth produced by Powertran from about 1978 to 1984. The Transcendent was a side project of EMS designer Tim Orr; Powertran was the company he set up to sell the synth. A main goal of the Transcendent was to be inexpensive; accordingly, it was offered only as a kit. All of the circuitry, except for the panel controls, was contained on a single board.
The Transcendent 2000 actually was fairly full-featured for an inexpensive synth, although it had only a single VCO. The VCO produced a pulse wave with variable pulse width, or a waveform that was continuously variable between triangle and sawtooth. A noise source could also be mixed in. The VCF was switchable between lowpass and bandpass behavior, and the resonance could be turned up to speaker-threatening levels. The VCF was controlled by an ADSR envelope generator, which could be gated by the keyboard or retriggered by the LFO, or the VCF could be bypassed for continuous drones.
The LFO produced square and triangle waveforms. A mix of either could control the VCO frequency; the VCO could also be modulated by the ADSR or via a sample and hold circuit driven by the noise source. The LFO triangle or the sample and hold could also modulate the VCF frequency. An additional envelope generator was also dedicated to the VCF, and it could be set to AD or AR behavior.
Performance controls included a portamento control, and a knob on the panel that provided pitch wheel behavior. Early versions had tuning issues because the pitch knob lacked a center detent; this was corrected in later editions. The C-to-C keyboard spanned three octaves; it did not have velocity or aftertouch sensing, those features being almost unknown on monophonic synths of the era. An octave select switch offered three octave settings.
The back panel included high-level and low-level outputs, a jack to connect an expression pedal to sweep the VCF frequency, and an external audio input to the VCF. A CV/Gate input jack pair was also provided; however, the VCO did not scale to 1V/octave, so the performer had to figure out how to attenuate the incoming control voltage to make the VCO play in tune. The gate input also had the quirk that the synth did not respond to it unless a key was held down. (A common modification was to add a switch to bypass the keyboard when the CV/Gate input was being used to control the synth.)
A notable user of the Transcendent 2000 was Joy Division's guitarist Bernard Sumner, who had taken an interest in synths. He bought and assembled one, and used it on Joy Division's albums.
Transcendent collapsed in the mid-1980s after an attempt to offer a polyphonic synth as a kit. An estimate for how many Transcendent 2000 kits were sold is 1000. Of this number, it is unknown how many of the buyers actually completed the build. As is the case with any kit-built synth, functionality and condition can vary greatly depending on the skill of the builder. There was a DIY community centered on the synth, and a number of modifications were published.