[sdiy] Solaris at NAMM

[cheater cheater]

I like my 816 but it is not a supercomputer, in fact due to a 'trick'
people at Stanford came up with the whole algorithm could be executed
with simple additions and the output had to go through a single LUT.

Nope, the THX Deep Note was not done on a Synclavier. It was also not
a CS-80. And it is not an organ and not a recording. It is an
algorithmically produced sound created by Dr James 'Andy' Moorer with
the use of a mainframe computer on which a program ran (what could be
called a DSP program, if the term DSP had existed then), all this at
the Lucasfilm computer division. I know little about what the hardware
was actually, but here's what the algorithm was doing according to
Moorer:

" I could get about 30 oscillators running in real-time on the device.
(...) The oscillators were not simple - they had 1-pole smoothers on
both amplitude and frequency."

"20,000 lines of code [written in C] produce about 250,000 lines of
statements of the form "set frequency of oscillator X to Y Hertz" "

So, considering that this is about 13 seconds of sound and 'Andy's
recollection of the numbers is correct, that is an update rate between
640 Hz and 19.2 kHz depending on how those "statements" looked. That's
quite a good amount of performance and I would take a bet that not
much worse than the Solaris. Bear in mind that the calculation in the
solaris does not happen at 96kHz, it's just the output rate. The
algorithms probably get updated at a lower rate. Maybe 2 kHz, that's
the standard right now - ever wondered why VAs have LFOs that only go
up to 2kHz? That's why.

Considering that the Solaris still isn't out and the THX sound was
made on something that has existed 30 years ago, I think the
comparison is quite fair.

D.

On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 20:23, Graham Atkins <gatkins at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
> Yes Cheater,
>
> You're absolutely right, that was done on the Synclavier which does
> have a lot of power. You could also include the Yamaha TX816 I suppose
> which could also make some impressive noises.
>
> Graham
>
> On 20 Jan 2010, at 16:54, cheater cheater wrote:
>
>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sfg9DVwOd9w
>>
>> On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 17:40, Tom Wiltshire <tom at electricdruid.net>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> On 20 Jan 2010, at 14:44, Richard Wentk wrote:
>>>
>>>> It's basically a 1980s instrument that's very late - like a PPG Realizer
>>>> that actually works (or will work) - not a 2010s instrument that's ahead
>>>> of
>>>> the game.
>>>
>>> That's a bit unfair, I reckon. Show me a single 80's synth that has
>>> anything
>>> like the processing power in Solaris. It's got 6 SHARC processors, and
>>> does
>>> all it's audio calculation in 32-bit floating point at 96KHz. That's
>>> definitely a 21st century specification.
>>>
>>> Whether it does anything genuinely new with all that power is obviously a
>>> separate question.
>>>
>>> T.
>>>
>>>
>>>
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>
>