The time taken for a sound to achieve maximum amplitude. Drums have a fast attack, whereas bowed strings have a slow attack. In compressors and gates, the attack time equates to how quickly the processor can change its gain....
Xpander
The Xpander was Oberheim's first synth product that was designed from the ground up
with MIDI in mind. It was a 6-voice, multitimbral analog synthesizer with an extremely
flexible design. Each voice or group of voices could either be assigned to respond to a
specific MIDI channel (1-16), to a specific keyboard range on a specific MIDI channel, or
to any of 6 CV/Gate (1volt/octave) inputs. The output of each voice could be panned
separately (7-positions) in the stereo output, or accessed individually through their own
separate direct output. The Xpander also had a mono (summed stereo) output.
Each voice consisted of 2 VCOs (triangle, saw, pulse, or noise, VCO2 could be synced
to VCO1), a multimode VCF (low-pass, band-pass, notch-pass, high-pass and four
"combination" filter modes), and 4 VCA's (in line one after each oscillator and two after
the VCF). FM of VCO1 and the VCF was possible via VCO1. The filters could also be
set as 1-pole (6dB/octave), 2-pole (12dB/octave), 3-pole (18dB/octave), or 4-pole
(24dB/octave). All oscillators and filters could be tuned by a handy auto-tuned routine.
In addition to this basic synth engine, the Xpander had a number of separate modules
that could be inserted in any modulation path. These include (5) LFO's with basic waves
plus sample-and-hold and random functions, 3 tracking generators, 3 ramp generators,
a lag processor (does not necessarily have to be used for portamento), and 1 additional
global LFO to be used with the Mod Wheel.
You could store 100 program patches and then set up an additional 100 multi-timbre
setups storing any of those patches on each of the 6 voices, panning them and
assigning how each voice is controlled. Patches could be dumped to cassette or via
MIDI sys-exe.