On Thu, Sep 10, 2015 at 11:21:12PM -0400,
backshall1@... [korgpolyex] wrote:
> Sorry to all the Juno fans out there, but I don’t think the 106 has much going for it. The only reason I think it might be worth more than a DW-8000 is because it has 16 slide controls, which really invite tweaking during performance. The DW has a number pad and up/down buttons much like a Poly-800, with the addition of a Data slider to make coarse adjustments or quickly move through an entire parameters range. Of course, you have to select the parameter first and you can only change one parameter at a time. The Juno-106 also has nice sounding filters, when they work. Unfortunately these are the dreaded 80017 daughter boards that had so many early failures due to the deteriorating plastic coating.
> There is nothing wrong with the DW-8000 filters. The NJM2069 sound just fine to me. They are are the same thing that is in the Poly-800 and the DW has eight of them instead of just one. Unison mode is absolutely horrible on a Juno-106. Six digital oscillators synced to the same clock. Hard sync, with just enough phase difference to cause harmonic cancellation that results in a static hollow honking tone. The DW-8000 has automatic detuning in unison mode to get some nice swirling motion without any additional effects. With 16 oscillators it’s HUGE. Add velocity, aftertouch, arpeggiator and digital delay and it is hard to think of the DW as a poor man’s anything. Oh, and the Joystick. The 8000 works the same as the 800, with pitch bend to the left and right, LFO to pitch in the forward direction and LFO to filter cutoff in the back direction. The Juno has pitch bend of course, but pushing it forward just turns a switch on to activate modulation. It doesn’t move in the backwards direction.
The unison thing is annoying, and would have been a really easy software fix. On the upside for the Juno, the oscillators don't aliase or go out of tune.
Most analogue synths from the MIDI era use the same counter and analogue waveshaper technique, incidentally. The CEM3396s used in a lot of synths are exactly this implemented on a single chip.
It's also got really really fast envelope updates, giving a nice punchy attack - something a lot of synths could benefit from and the main reason in my homebrew stuff I run the envelope generator at a minimum of 1kHz.
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Gordonjcp MM0YEQ