The Vako Orchestron is a keyboard instrument made in the 1970s, that produces its sound through electronic amplification of sounds pre-recorded as an optical track on a disc. It is the professional version of the Mattel Optigan, an earlier and lower-priced model intended for amateur musicians.
The Vako Orchestron is a keyboard instrument made in the 1970s, that produces its sound through electronic amplification of sounds pre-recorded as an optical track on a disc. It is the professional version of the Mattel Optigan, an earlier and lower-priced model intended for amateur musicians.
== History == Vako Synthesizers Incorporated, founded by electronic instrument pioneer and former Moog technician and salesperson David Van Koevering, started to build improved versions of the Optigan under the name Orchestron in 1975. Intended for professional use as an alternative to the Mellotron (hence the name Orchestron), it featured improved recorded sounds over the Optigan. The Optigan was an organ that played its sounds from light-scanned graphic waveforms encoded on film discs. The sounds with the highest fidelity were on the outer rings of these discs, and these outer rings were used for the Orchestron sounds to improve the sound. Although the Model A Orchestron is identical to the Optigan, the models B, C, and D follow the designs of the Chilton Talentmaker. The Talentmaker was taken out of the market after Optigan's manufacturer – Optigan Corporation, a subsidiary of toy company Mattel – threatened to sue Chilton because of patent infringements.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).