Archive of the former Yahoo!Groups mailing list: The Yamaha AN1x Synthesizer mailing list

This is my first post on this group, so greets to everyone. I've enjoyed my An1x for many years, and I'm happy to be joining the rest of you on this board.

I searched the past messages, and didn't find anything on this topic, so I'm sorry if this has been discussed before.

Basically, the problem I'm experiencing is this:

When I use any layer panning option other than 'off' (e.g. alt or random) I can hear a pop sound when the polyphony limit is reached. It seems that when voice stealing kicks in, this somehow causes a glitch with or somehow interrupts the correct functioning of layer panning.

Several years ago, I first ran into this problem when I was creating a polyphonic pad sound. I set the panning to random and found that my patch was sitting a bit better in the stereo field of the mix, but once I started playing some chords, I heard clicks. It seemed like the release time of VCA was long enough that overlapping voices were dropping out and causing the click when they did. Even playing the same passage twice from a sequencer, the problem didn't happen with complete consistency, but never occurred less than once in four times the offending passage was played. I think that when a voice drops out there's a chance it can happen at that point in time, but whether it does or not appears to be somewhat random.

I tried all possible layering modes, but continued to encounter the clicks, although in the 'single' mode for example, the problem was less frequent since more polyphony was available. Of course voice stealing was silent and correct as always when I set the panning back to 'off'.

I'm posting this to see if anyone else has ever encountered this and also to see if there is some kind of workaround. It's only a minor problem, but I have noticed that certain sounds which use reverb, especially strings, seems to have a slightly nicer stereo image with the panning on versus off.

To recreate the glitch, set up a patch with a moderate VCA release time of at least 60 or so and choose a unison layering mode to aggravate the polyphony problem. Play a few passages with chords on both hands. It may take up to a full minute of playing to hear the problem sometimes, and playing through the chords faster will also help you hit the polyphony limit more easily and frequently. Adding reverb will help the clicks become more audible.