I am considering adding something new to the Poly-800.
I am thoroughly disappointed with the Poly-800 DCO's.
1) The square wave output is OK but the sawtooth is horrible. It's much more of a slightly saw-ish square.
2) the detuning is pathetic. The detune circuit doesn't actually detune in the true sense. It just moves the DCO's 5-7 out of phase with DCO's 1-4.
3) There's no adjusting the wave shape at all. The adding and removing of harmonics is extremely rudimentary.
Now is the time for people to make suggestions for what they might like if I added new oscillators.
Keep in mind...
1) cost - cheap, cheap, cheap - try to keep the kit under $100 probably closer to $50.
2) complexity - simple - the kit is for modder's with simple electronic skills.
3) low time to develop - the full blown solution would be to use an FPGA to create waveforms. Sorry, not going that route because I don't have the time. Unless someone else can convince me that FPGA programming is going to be easy and require little time on my behalf.
Question: is anyone aware of a top octave generator still being manufactured that is similar to say the SGS M082 or the other various TG's that were widely used in the 80's? I can't find one but a simple design I have cooking would require a top octave generator.
Or, if anyone is aware of a low cost music synthesis chip I could use, please make suggestions.
The idea would be to disable the existing DCO's (under HAWK control) and enable an entirely new set of oscillators/sound generation to be injected into the audio path before the filter. I am not looking to spend much time on this. But I really would like to expand the Poly sound capabilities at the beginning of sound path.
Mike