In the early 1980′s, a group of Soviet audiophonic engineers finally perfected the long elusive brown note. Listen to this. See? There’s the proof. Under Kruschev, these men would have been hailed as heroes as capitalist o-ring after o-ring sloppily disgorged itself, paralyzing the Americans as the heroes of the motherland swarmed over the Iron Curtain. But under the flabby, pacifist leadership of Gorbachev and his wishy-washy friendship with Ronald Reagan, there were no military applications for the technology, and so — somewhat ruefully — the technology was repurposed as a synthesizing chip for a line of cheap children’s keyboards.
And now you can own one, thanks to a plucky eBayer from Simferopol in the Ukraine, who is auctioning them off for $79 per pop! Not too shabby for a portable Soviet prototype of the same technology that will one day be applied to Spider Jerusalem’s Bowel Disruptor Gun. Just make sure to Google Translate the manual: the 2-3 button indicates the ‘prolapse’ setting.
PIF very rare little soviet synth [eBay via Retro-Thing]
mmmmmm…..Spider Jerusalem….those were fantastic books.
Vogon muzak?
Heh. The first bit of that “brown note” gave me a Robotron flashback.
Hmm. I didn’t see anything there lower than 200hz with a 1.5hz carier. Nothing like a brown note, IMHO.
Thanks for that @mrscience!
I was about to waste $79 on something that couldn’t actually cause my enemies to soil themselves. Phew.
Are you sure you didn’t mean to log in as @captainobvious?
Sounds like Emerson Lake and Palmer to me. I don’t think they caused anyone to soil themselves unless they inhaled.
Here in Quebec, we only got crappy plastic gadgets in the Pif Gadget magazine ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pif_Gadget ). Did they got those awesome gadgets in the Russian edition ?
Soviet synths are so hot right now.
The ery idea that this audio triggers a bowel movement is so funny that I laughed so hard that I shit my pants.
(Not true, fortunately. But it’d be hilarious if it were. ☺)
I thought for a minute the Russians were creating synthetic children. I am relieved and/or unimpressed.
The Poo-Poo Train left Mecharius Station shortly after listening to the clip. Correlation = Causation, right? Right?
That thing sounds seriously cool. Reminds me of the 303, where it sounded nothing like what they were going for (bass guitar) but ended up a cult sensation after it was discontinued. That synth could have some really fun uses.
I bet someone from Franz Ferdinand is making a bid on one right now.
#5: Given the comments that I’ve seen recently… no, I wouldn’t expect readers to realize that this isn’t actually in the 5-10hz range.
Additionally, there is the obvious possibility that the MP3 *did* contain a waveform that couldn’t be played by anyone’s computer speakers. So I looked at it.
Sheesh.
@MrScience-
When spectrum analyzers are outlawed…
That was… odd! Felt something in my chest and the old Muladhara chakra whenever a note was playing. Freaky.
I’ll have to pump this out over my Squeezebox to the home theater system, perhaps after a breakfast of whole wheat gingerbread and strong coffee.
Price has doubled and the auction hasn’t ended yet… thanks Boing Boing.