Archive of the former Yahoo!Groups mailing list: Korg Poly800/EX800 Users

Yes, you could mix them but it wouldn't do anything much at all. Let me explain...

The biggest drawback of the Poly-800 design was the tone generator. The MSM5232 was produced to be used in arcade games and it was used in many, many of them too!

So Korg took the MSM5232 and put it into the Poly-800 because they were trying to build a low cost synth. They certainly achieved that but in doing so, they left the Poly-800 with a very primitive oscillator source. The MSM5232 produces pure square wave output. IC4 and IC5 section provides a way to produce a slightly, kind of, sort of triangle wave shape by attenuating the four octave sources.

Mixing them is not going to achieve anything in my opinion. I hate to disappoint you but the MSM5232 waveform generation is THAT primitive.

That's why my focus now (and it's a rather fuzzy focus given my other commitments) is on altering the DCO2 clock so that it is far more independent of DCO1 (giving us far better phasing). And, I am also thinking about providing a kit to completely replace the original TG with a new one so that all eight DCO's are fully independent of each other and so that they can produce a far wider variety of wave forms (perhaps using a waveform ROM like the DW-8000). But that is all just a bit of a wish list right now.

It's actually interesting how a global economic slow down has real effects on projects like these (which I consider to be "cultural"). So as economic considerations become major to individuals (including me), time on "cultural" projects, hobbies etc is pressured or crimped.

But hopefully, I will be able to get the HAWK arpeggiator done this year!

Mike