Moog One - A Look Inside

We’ll kick things off by taking a look inside the Moog One. Removing the underside panels leaves you with this lovely view. The voice card stacks are under the black fan shrouds on either side. They are stacked 4 per side with 2 voices per card giving the 8 or 16 voice options.

Moog opted for an external power supply so not much going on at the power input, some protection and filtering.

The IO for most of the jacks.

The fan noise can be a bit much even in ideal conditions. When first turning on the One they spin full speed sounding very much like a server turning on. In an air conditioned environment they don’t spin very fast but are noticeable. I found that putting in silicone mounts instead of the screws substantially reduced the noise, it’s still there but its more of a whoosh and less whine.

This is the controller / interface to the voice cards. Underneath is the carrier for the system on module (SOM) which runs Linux.

One of the voice cards. They are stacked 4 high with 2 voices per card and 1 stack on either side of the synth.

Finally, the carrier housing the SOM card. Note the pads below the SOM, specifically the SOMRX and SOMTX. These are serial RX and TX pins I used to get a Linux console which I will pick up in more detail in part 2.

Some kind of ARM based system on module with 2GB DDR3 (H5TQ2G63FFR) and 8GB eMMC (NCEMASD9-08G).

I’ll have to do a more thorough teardown some day. This was primarily to look at the voice cards and what’s running the Linux system.