George (and "Anonymous"): take a look at the 49MB PDF service manual which somebody has stored here:

http://www.nitrogen.myzen.co.uk/Korg/Korg%20VC10%20Service%20Manual.pdf

( http://alturl.com/5abfd if that's mangled)

Have a look at KLM-134 (the 9th page in, of 19 pages)) which shows the 20 channels, the top four of which have sibilant noise added.

Each channel is shown with different passband characteristics; the first channel spells out the carrier/modulator channels with opamp architecture which is then duplicated for the remainder.

As I said before, there are 20 channels open for anyone to see if they can read a cct diagram. There can be no debate.

George and Anonymous are absolutely incorrect. They don't know what they're talking about.

anonymous is absolutely correct, it's an 8-band vocoder. read up on your specs before attempting to correct someone who knows what they're talking about :)

reply to anonymous:
well... actually I can read schematics and the VC10 is very interesting in that way. it is clearly a 20 band vocoder. also, the VC10 is paraphonic. a nice feature for such a cheap machine.

bands - channels - all we wre doing here is confusing different terms for the same end purpose. A vocoder splits the inpout passband up into a number of discrete bands or channels, which are then used with envelope followers to control the carrier. Korg has got 20 circuits inside which, as has been painstakingly reiterated a nunber of times, accounts for the performance of the instrument. What makes it cheaper than various makes (e.g. Synton, EMS etc.) is that the channels are all fixed in their frequency reponse - there are not a multitude of controls like you might find elsewhere.

Anonymous is still sticking to his confused position but the fact is, the Korg VC-10 has 20 vocoding channels inside it. Or120 vocoding bands, whichever you choose to use as a descriptor; they are all fixed response unlike expensive Moogs etc.

Please accept the facts and stop posting nonsense!

Okay, I just searched on Google and found-out that bands and channels are NOT the same (if talking about frequency, which I'm not sure of here). Anyway bands are divided into channels (how many??), so there are more channels than bands. Yes the VC-10 has 20 channels (much to my bewilderment), but I'm not sure how many bands (if they're going by the same rules as frequency does). If it's 2 channels per band that would make it a 10-band vocoder. 10-band x 2-channels per band = 20-channels. Idk.