>And of course even vintage DX7s go for a quite high price in second+ hand market... Everytime I read about some cool old synth, I check how much they cost and they are always hundreds or thousands of dollars, I think DX7s are like $500+.
I think the cheapest you could reasonably expect to get a useable synth with a decent keyboard is $300, independent of age and coolness. That's where you'll find a Microkorg or a Mininova or something. Of course you can get romplers and keyboards with preprogrammed sounds much cheaper. And you can probably do something quite nice with a Behringer JT-4000M (once it hits the shops) and a cheap MIDI keyboard.
Yamaha reface dx goes for 250 on the used market. It’s totally worth the money if you understand its limitations.
> With hindsight, the DX7 and its ilk look like a weird diversion in the path of musical progress. Operator synthesis makes no logical sense. It became popular because we had the capability to do digital sound generation, but lacked the technology to do it in a comprehensible, systematic way. So the DX7 enjoyed huge popularity for a few years, before fading into obscurity. That's a weird take. I mean "Operator synthe…
>And of course even vintage DX7s go for a quite high price in second+ hand market... Everytime I read about some cool old synth, I check how much they cost and they are always hundreds or thousands of dollars, I think DX7s are like $500+.
Plenty of people hoard classic synths like trophy pieces and never use them. Which sucks for people interested in making music or starting a new hobby with some old gear.
It’s probably one of the most popular things to do in the music scene.
If people are interested in the DX7's technical details, I've done some work reverse-engineering it, and some of Yamaha's other FM synths: https://ajxs.me/blog/tag/DX7.html Ken Shirriff has also done some amazing work analysing the DX7's sound chips: https://www.righto.com/2021/11/reverse-engineering-yamaha-dx... A really awesome documentary on the DX7 by MadFame: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXt_NXjc7oY There are…
The design of the DX7 ASIC is really quite astonishing. They used every trick they could think of to make it work given the technology limitations, like a 96-step shift register and using a lookup table to produce the sine wave. The lookup table is clever, too, storing only half the table, and storing log2() of the values instead of the original value so they can use addition instead of multiplication to compute the…
and all these tricks to generate oscillators are still used to this day in digital hardware and software synthesizers:
> With hindsight, the DX7 and its ilk look like a weird diversion in the path of musical progress. Operator synthesis makes no logical sense. It became popular because we had the capability to do digital sound generation, but lacked the technology to do it in a comprehensible, systematic way. So the DX7 enjoyed huge popularity for a few years, before fading into obscurity. That's a weird take. I mean "Operator synthe…
>And of course even vintage DX7s go for a quite high price in second+ hand market... Everytime I read about some cool old synth, I check how much they cost and they are always hundreds or thousands of dollars, I think DX7s are like $500+.
Hundreds of dollars for an antique long out of production seems extremely reasonable to me. I'm not sure what you were expecting, $10?
It's also a pretty substantial object. They have a metal case! It's quite a large and heavy thing to ship and store.
>And of course even vintage DX7s go for a quite high price in second+ hand market... Everytime I read about some cool old synth, I check how much they cost and they are always hundreds or thousands of dollars, I think DX7s are like $500+.
Plenty of people hoard classic synths like trophy pieces and never use them. Which sucks for people interested in making music or starting a new hobby with some old gear. It’s probably one of the most popular things to do in the music scene.
It's not so bad as long as the gears are taken good care of, if this isn't a thing we'll find them defunct in a dumpster yard. There are still positives about having a vintage collector scene, like USB floppy emulator kits, LCD kits, new mods, hacks, sharing old drivers etc.
I lived that era, and don't miss the DX7 at all. Yes, when it came out it was revolutionary and if you wanted to produce very thin sounds, (some) credible organs, really nice electric pianos, punching basses, and metallic sounding instruments that one was the keyboard to use, no doubt, but the drawback was that almost everything else would sound terrible, I mean really awful. Additive synth is great only if done well, and the first DX synthesizer were a lot limited in some fields; if you tried to make a track only using a DX7 it would be a compromise wrapped around other compromises. For starters, operators could generate only sine waves, and every other waveform had to be emulated by frequency modulating an operator by another synced operator; that could be used to make some really interesting effects and sounds, but no way one could produce for example believable strings; they were just terrible. Also it had no filters, that is, no VCF/DCF/whatever, so no way to produce credible sweeps or warm pads that would have been trivial to produce with a 10 years older keyboard.
DX7 has been revolutionary for sure, but had its share of limitations, and (plugins aside, of course) rather than spending money on a vintage DX7, I'd get a smaller and much cheaper FM expander to be driven together in unison with a traditional analog sounding one; the 1st one for the aggressive attack, the 2nd one for more warmth.
As for additive synth, I deeply regret having sold my Kawai K5000 years ago; that was really a beast. Heck, That applies pretty much to all my old gear, but sometimes one is forced to, only to regret much later.