[sdiy] FPGA Synth Music

[Cary Roberts]

>Sure, but my point was that FM was the first "interesting" and versatile
form of digital
>synthesis to really hit the mass market, and for a good reason: with clever
implementation,
>it could be done very efficiently. 96 operators on a single VLSI is pretty
good for 1983,
>right? Everything else out there was either way more basic (Casio's
"consonant-vowel"
>stuff) and/or way more expensive (everything else at the time). If you took
advantage of
>some of Yamaha's optimizations, you could have more operators and polyphony
than you know
>what to do with, and still at a really good sample rate. Plus I think the
"time sharing
>via shift register" thing does make it easier to deal with multiple
algorithms.

Has anyone else here had the pleasure of hearing the Con Brio ADS 200?  I
have and the sound was breathtaking.  Makes a Yamaha 4 or 6 op synth sound
like buzzy radio in comparison.  The bell tones were especially clear and
harmonious, without the clang I associate with Yamaha FM.  Pretty amazing
that they could do 64 voices of polyphony with 16 op FM back in 1980.  I
spoke with one of the developers a few years ago when Brian Kehew drug his
ADS 200 up to the Computer History museum in Mountain View.  They used some
hardware multiply accumulators for the math and a couple 6502s for control.
It's truly a shame all the documentation and code was thrown out in 1990s.
It would make a spectactular hardware synth if implemented in FPGA.  I'm
guessing there were some design decisions done in the control software that
contributed to it's unique sound.  I didn't think the controls were very
intuitive but I'm not sure anything can make 16 op FM intuitive.

-Cary