[sdiy] Polysynths: 8 voice or 16 voice?

[Mattias Rickardsson]

Sergio Alves <theatomlabspt at gmail.com> skrev:

> From a pianist point of view 10 voices are plenty.. ten fingers ten
> voices..
>

As others have already commented, pianists have both pedals and tails. :-)

I think the voice stealing problems are easy to underestimate unless you're
a pianist playing synths. I'm not, so I'm guided by the digital pianos on
the market:
- The cheapest Yamaha Clavinova has 256 voices polyphony.
- The Kawai MP 9000 from 1999 had 64 voices, stereo sounds consuming 2
each, but I read that it used some mechanism that turned stereo samples to
mono when exceeding 32, so the total polyphony in those cases ended up at
48.
Seemingly 32 was not considered enough polyphony for a professional piano
even in 1999. (Or 16, considering that two sounds can also be layered.)

This might seem almost irrelevant in a non-pianist discussion, but hardware
polysynths often have around 4-8 voices because it's "enough" for certain
synth usecases, so when it comes to 8 vs 16 voices in a monotimbral setup
as in the original question here - then it's the pianist problems that
start becoming relevant. :-)

/mr

>
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