thought i'd mention: i'm messing around with MFB Synth Lite II and PolyLite
synths at the moment. much lamenting online that the oscillators are not
VCO, and not quite DCO - they are to be considered 'digital oscillators'...
point being: still an excellent (tiny) synth that does a great job of sounding
like a large analog poly. it's filter and VCA are analog.
the 1st edition elicited complaints, and he eventually revised the waveforms,
which are generated by a cpu (these were made in 2003 and again in 2006,
if that means much re: what was available then - and now). saw sounds
pretty cool now.
just saying that digital oscillator doesn't have to mean 'VA', and the thing can
still sound juicy and analog. korg poly saw isn't exactly (isn't exactly a saw)
a showstopper, so pretty much anything will sound good there :)
i read yesterday that the practical difference between a DCO and a 'digital osc'
is that the digital will always start with the same phase, and that analog,
including DCO, are free-running. don't know to what extent this is true.
the other issue with a digital osc used in unadulterated form is aliasing at
high pitches, and weird digi-artifacts (quite good when you find them on the
MFB) - you can generate a saw that looks good in the midrange but if you
want to avoid aliasing, you have to start limiting bandwidth as you go up
in pitch (nyquist etc) -
if you are thinking of using wavetables:are wavetables 'honest'(?)
∗in a DCO synthesizer?∗ 8-) (hey, who cares, more waveforms to mess
around with is good....could have squares and saws from a multitude of
machines.
the MFB has ringmodulation and sync - apparently these are-necessarily-
digital, with whatever sound differences that implies (in practice, it's a
machine that makes loads of good sounds, has loads of variation, so it
isn't an issue, for me,anyway) - so if you want to do crossmodulations of
oscs, will that also be 'digital'?(worth worrying about?)
and for the filter,..so you are suggesting you would reproduce the existing
filter, which is single across 6 voices, and offer a filter for each voice. like
a 'proper' poly. question: is there a big difference between 'global' and
individual filters?(if all are calibrated the same)
(what will be left of the original Poly ? ...!!!)