[sdiy] Synergy FM [was: Re: DX7 hacking?]

[Richard Wentk]

The tragedy wasn't that Synergy didn't shrink the 74xx chips into an ASIC. The tragedy was that Atari killed the AMY, which was a 64 oscillator Synergy on a single chip with FFT support:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_AMY

AMY would likely have been really, really cheap, and it probably wouldn't have been hard to do a multi-chip synth with epic sound design potential and huge polyphony.

Of course now you could use any number of options to do a version with Moar Oscillators [tm] and much improved polyphony in a gate array, or such. 

But additive is still a pig to program, unless you have almost endless time to spend on it. 

You could solve that by adding some resynthesis options, so you could throw samples at an FFT and use the output to control the oscillators. But you then have a much more complex project. It would be immensely powerful, but also a ton of work. 

Incidentally, the Synclavier also had FM before the DX7 did. If I remember right, it had programmable overtone oscillators and a semi-open patching architecture, also done on a hardware card. Because the Synclavier applied extra volume envelopes to its DAC channels, the sound was much punchier than the DX. And eventually NED did add resynthesis features.

It's a bit sad that all these technologies appeared and then disappeared again. Nowadays you get endless softsynth variations on DCO-DCA-DCF with assorted modulators, but not so much of the really interesting stuff that used to happen back then. (There are a few exceptions, but not many.)

Richard

P.S. I can't remember if I've posted this before, but here's Laurie Spiegel playing the 72 oscillator Hal Alles synth:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NChqEEz31eE

How awesome is that for 1977?

On 1 Jul 2012, at 22:41, Lanterman, Aaron wrote:

> 
> On Jul 1, 2012, at 5:36 PM,  wrote:
> 
>> Once you add the Synergy's pretty sophisticated envelopes, you have a really interesting machine that could give the DX series a run for its money -- that is, if Yamaha hadn't been able to get the price point as low as they did! If Digital Keyboards had access to ASIC design and fabrication facilities, history might have been different.
> 
> A quick follow up -- everything in the Synergy is standard 74 series logic chips. You can look at the oscillator board and touch the accumulators and adders and all that, which you can't really do on a DX. (Not that you would want to per se.)
> 
> - Aaron
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