[sdiy] Polysynths: 8 voice or 16 voice?

[cheater cheater]

Well, I mean, pianists are not the only ones using a lot of polyphony.
Think of organs or string ensembles. Just sayin'.

On Mon, Jul 27, 2026 at 4:32 PM Mattias Rickardsson <mr at analogue.org> wrote:
>
> 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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