Expert Sleepers Silent Way v2.4.3 - Manual (Page 87)

Manual DAC
The cluster of controls to the right of the Ran-
dom section allow you to replace the notional
‘DAC’ with a manually set combiner. A DAC
can be thought of as a weighted sum of the input signals - if each bit of the register is ‘0’ or
‘1’, then by summing them with weights of negative powers of 2 (0.5, 0.25, 0.125 etc.) a
regular binary digital-to-analogue conversion is achieved. However, by setting the weights
to other, arbitrary, values a different sequence of values is produced for the same bit pat-
tern.
The weights are set by the control that looks like a smaller version of the main step editors.
In this control, each step corresponds to one bit of the ‘DAC’. Therefore, the number of
steps here is controlled by the DAC Bits knob.
The two drop-down menus offer further control over the values generated. The ‘Range
Mode’ control sets whether the signal is allowed to be positive and negative (bipolar) or
only positive (unipolar). The ‘Scale Mode’ control sets how the sum of weights is scaled to
produce the final value written to the step sequence. The options are:
• Manual - the scaling is set by the ‘Scale’ knob.
• Automatic - the scaling is set directly by the number of DAC Bits.
• Dynamic - the scaling is set by adding up all the weight values.
In all cases, the scale value is used to divide the sum of bits/weights.