Orrery — Copenhagen

The archive

Oregon, USA · 1979 – c. 2001
11 instruments
Issued as VST3 · AU

Tekura

“Introduces controlled quantization error, for measurement and effect.”

Tekura was the oldest of the four houses and the least sentimental. It built precision instruments for measuring digital audio's flaws — signal analyzers, quantization and jitter meters, converter test sets — and its analyzers became the reference against which studios and broadcasters characterized their converters. If a Tekura scope showed it, it was true. Measurement went soft: PC-based analysis did the work of a rack for a hundredth of the price, and the audio-instruments division was sold off around 2001, ending without ceremony. Orrery bought the remaining reference units and the calibration archive at auction. Used as effects, these instruments are precision turned inside out.

The collection

The instruments

The Tekura catalogue — 11 instruments

OR-0013

Ser. Type 2200 · Ser. No. 01138-B · 1990 · effect

2200 — Signal Decimator

The sample-rate side of destruction, with the honesty an instrument demands: it lets you choose clean band-limited decimation or the aliased kind, deliberately.

OR-0014

Ser. Type 1601 · Ser. No. 00092-A · 1992 · effect

1601 — Jitter Reference

An instrument for injecting clock jitter in measured amounts — as an effect, a subtle, frequency-dependent smear and shimmer that most tools can't make.

OR-0015

Ser. Type 3100 · Ser. No. 00461-C · 1994 · effect

3100 — Perceptual Codec

The lab's generic perceptual coder, with the masking model exposed on the panel — a measurement framing of the "lossy compression" sound, tunable from transparent to obviously crushed.