Those Magpie knobs from Love My Switches arrived, and… I’m not thrilled.
Don’t get me wrong, they look and feel nice. Extra style points for the almost-matching colors (that Cutoff ring is orange and I bought a red knob). But they are those shiny aluminum knobs similar to Noise Engineering, which reflect glare that obscures which way they’re pointing. And on the silver knobs the white pointers are even trickier to see (I went for “metallic gray” and should have ordered “silver” which have a black pointer).
The glare is actually worse than this from my usual eye level below the knobs (it’s on an almost vertical stand). Maybe if the synth were flat on a table and I was above it there’d be no problem. The same is true of the Noise Engineering knobs.
I found that I didn’t need the brass inserts at all, and in fact the knobs turned less smoothly without them. And also that the hex wrench I have for this is utterly unsuitable for the small spaces (not an L-shape but a bulky multi-wrench thing). And the old knobs were super gross, leaving sticky residue all over my hands. I wish I’d worn rubber gloves!
I also found that Davies 1900h knobs for round shafts also fit (although mine are shiny enough to also glare). Tall Trimmer Toppers from Thonk fit absolutely fine, but look funny because of the small size. Shemp knobs (for T18 knurled shafts) from Love My Switches themselves, also fit fine with no fuss whatsoever. If only I had a spare 23 of them…
With a little more digging I found several options for 90-degree D-shaft knobs on AliExpress, A few brands of mixers use them apparently. So why didn’t I find this before? Sometimes I hate search engines 😛 I found a lot of 45 of these for under $14.