[sdiy] Synclavier

[Scott Nordlund]

>> all of the "smart" designs, it seems to use hardware
>> multipliers and separate hardware for each voice.  There is
>> some quality advantage to this, since it supports higher
>> sample rates, and each voice has its own multiplying DAC,
>> but it's nasty 8 bit stuff anyway.
>
> 8bit wave and 8bit ref for amplitude and variable
> sample rate aren't to bad in layers, NED claimed a
> decent 140db range.

Yeah, it's sorta quasi-floating point, no need for dither or 
anything like that.  And this variable sample rate/analog 
mixing is partly what gave the Synclavier its reputed high
sound quality.  But it also prevented it from progressing in
a period where competitors were moving to direct digital 
recording.

The Ensoniq EPS (and I'm sure others) did an interesting 
variant of this using a fixed sample rate, single multiplying
DAC.

> Some of the Synclaviers internals can be found in the patents
> taken by Sydney A Alonso. i get the impression this is the later
> sound engine patent 4554855?

Looks like it.  I don't mean to knock them because they seemed 
to be the first to do the additive/FM thing in a commercial 
product, but there were a lot of optimizations that they didn't
do.  In light of later refinements it's sort of got a Rube 
Goldberg thing going on.

> Techos, have no idea what he's talking about but it do sounds advanced.
> http://electro-music.com/forum/forum-162.html

He has to be some sort of mad scientist who was exiled from
IRCAM for trying to synthesize the voice of god or something.
 		 	   		  
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