The Yamaha AN1x Synthesizer mailing list

Hi All,

Pardon me if this is old news, I'll admit that I haven't dug through 
the archives enough. But...

Many people mention in the reviews that AN1x filters "step" alot. 
Some frown upon that, others choose to think of it as the 
instrument's character. I've always preferred the latter approach.

Again, I don't believe I'm the first one to discover this, but AN1x's 
filters are perfectly fine. It's the controllers. Maybe they were 
trying to conserve MIDI bandwidth, maybe it was a design oversight, 
maybe both, but the way the board generates midi controller messages 
(which in turn feed the control matrix, according to the manual) is 
sporadic at best. My humble findings are based on a board running OS 
1.2 - never really though about upgrading until now. :)

If I assign a controller to ribbon-X and record a midi track on a DAW 
while moving a finger across it in a steady fashion and at a moderate 
pace, the resulting controller footprint looks like the Devil's 
Staircase (those who don't know what this is, look up fractals on 
google). If the controller is changing fast enough, AN1x will omit 
some consecutive values, taking the liberty of "thinning out" the 
controller stream, but more horribly, the timing of the controller 
values being sent resembles a packet network more than anything else. 
That is, some controller messages are being delayed and, in my case, 
the controller changes are being sent in bursts of 2.

In other words, when you move the finger across the ribbon *evenly*, 
the controller change messages that come out are anything but even. 
The problem is worse when you're working with Local mode off, echoing 
the midi stream back to the instrument, than the other way around.

Now, suppose ribbon-X was assigned to filter cutoff. If I record a 
phrase with the controller movements and edit the controller stream 
by hand to make it contiguous and evenly timed (Cubase and I'm sure 
most other MIDI-capable software sequencers have those neat line and 
parabola drawing tools), the filter opening and closing sounds as it 
should - silky smooth.

Therefore, my conclusion is that AN1x is great as a midi controller 
(as in keyboard) - unless controller (as in midi CC) smoothness and 
continuity is important to you. And my question is: has 
this "contronller thinning feature" been addressed in the later 
firmware revisions?

Thanks,
Alex