The Yamaha AN1x Synthesizer mailing list

hemmer12000 schreef:

> Yeah, it's a shame Yamaha never made the next generation EX5. Yes, a
> Motif ES with a AN and a VL card would be close if not surpass the
> capabilities of an EX5 (no FDSP), but I'm not much of a fan of the PLG
> cards. The segregation of sound and control, that is, you cannot
> program the PLG cards in the host itself, makes it a pale comparison
> to an EX5. Seriously, I loved the AN cards' sound, but controlling
> them was tedious. For instance, and this is my biggest gripe, if I
> liked a sound but it incorporated an arp or step sequence, I COULD
> ONLY TURN IT OFF THROUGH SOFTWARE! Annoying. I also didn't like having
> to store user sounds to Smart Media...my CS6X wouldn't consistantly
> load an AUTOLD file and it often ended up corrupted. At least the EX5
> allows you to edit and store sounds internally.

The problem with the EX5, though, is that it is a flawed gem. Look at 
the AN1x: it's simple, it does exactly what it promises, and you always 
get your 10 voices.

The EX5, then... It has been claimed that the engineers built a 
super-synth, and then the commercial people decided it needed to be a 
workstation.

So you have a sequencer that is not exactly easy to use, and as for 
sampling and disc access, let's not even go there. The problem is that 
the EX5 has two CPUs and two DSPs. One CPU controls the external 
peripherals, the other controls the DSPs. The memory is connected to the 
DSPs.

Now, to get data from the disc (either floppy, SCSI or Firewire if you 
managed to get the mLAN upgrade) to the memory requires that it passes 
from one CPU to the other. And the bottleneck is there: it's either a 
tiny amount of shared memory, or a narrow bus over which all the data 
has to travel. The EX5's problems are endemic in the design.

Apart from that, there are only two AN voices (compared to 10 on the 
AN1x), or only one VL voice, or 16 FDSP voices, but not combined (except 
AN and FDSP, but both are halved). And doing this costs you an effect.

Also, it can't really reach those 126 voices. It's very deep, but it has 
so many problems that it can't have been a great success, and thus 
Yamaha will be reluctant to release a successor, when workstations like 
the Motif and those of the competition are safe and secure.

Having said all this, the EX5 is still a stunningly beautiful 
instrument, that does things that no other synth can do. Perhaps it's 
the last of a great line of Yamaha over-the-top synths, like the GX1, 
the DX1 or the VL1. I would hope it's not, though.

> I haven't tried sampling with the EX5R, mainly because I don't have a
> SCSI card with mine. But, the integration of sampling in the Motif ES
> is simply excellent - far beyond the EX5. But now that I think about
> it, I guess the ES doesn't have FDSP...wonder what I could do with
> samples and FDSP? Hmmm....

Use the EX5 as a synth and you'll be very happy. Use it as a workstation 
and be prepared for some disappointments. Still, if you upload a sample 
and mangle it with FDSP, you can do some wicked things indeed.

- Peter