vocoders

[Haible Juergen]

	>Vocoders are something that digital techniques (like DSP) are very
well 
	>suited for. The more bands (or bins) available, the more
intelligible the
	>speech. This leads to very high levels of complexity in the analog
world but
	>has no hardware impact in a DSP design (maybe a faster clock).

I partially agree with Grant here - a vocoder is a mostly linear system, so
a DSP
would be a good choice. But in practice there are two things to consider: 

(1) An analogue vocoder normally produces artefacts that you have to *know*
about
     before you start coding them into your DSP (unless you don't want to
have them,
     which surely is an option as well). And there are less talkative people
than
     there were, say, for modelling the behaviour of VCOs and VCFs for VA
synths.

(2) For some reason companies who decide on using a DSP do so to keep costs
     low (not a bad thing), but the very same reason is prohibitive when it
comes to
     adding a lot of knobs. And a vocoder without a lot of knobs is pretty
useless.

JH.