Strange Loop MK II – pre‑orders open!

The Strange Loop MK II preorders are officially open!

The last few weeks have been pretty hectic, I've spent them and perfecting the audio reactivity and doing revisions of the frontpanel with Eugenio from Spazio Muffa (who also designed the beautiful boxes and manual) , but now everything is ready!

Strange Loop MK II

A new take on the original design, it is essentially a video feedback loop contained in a box, specifically crafted for video art, live performances, and experimental setups.

The device can process live NTSC and PAL video from a capture card and also play 720x576 videos from a USB drive. It's also compatible out of the box with webcams and HDMI capture cards, and other V4L2 devices.

It allows for luma-keying of the source video into a frame buffer feedback loop, and lets you adjust this loop's parameters using knobs and thumbstick, as well as scaling, rotating and tilting the source image. It also responds to audio or CV signal, allowing you to modulate those parameters in real time.

Video Breaker

A short post to explain a bit about the Video Breaker:

Video Breaker device

It was born from a need to have higher resolution while doing analog glitch work without having to resort to digital emulations.

I wanted a compact device that was able to glitch HD analog sources, and it occurred me that both VGA and Component standards use three signals, albeit significantly differently.

A bit of technicalities:
VGA has actually 5 signals: three which carry picture information (0-0.7v) and two that carry Sync information on indipendent H/V sync channels.

These two can be passed thru directly, protecting the sync pulses from the glitch and eliminating the need for Time Base Correction - TBC), instead Component is slightly more complicated, it only has three channels, Y ( which is luma AND sync), and Pb/Pr (a colour difference pair), 0/0.7v.

So I set to design a glitch circuit that could handle both, as well as composite, while being CV controllable in the video range.


Since composite video only uses one signal, it was only natural to also make the device able to process three signals indipendently.
I tried to make it in a small Eurorack footprint while also making it fit in a metal enclosure, and the result was the Video Breaker.