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They don't make them like that any more: the Yamaha DX7 keyboard

kevinboone.me

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Re: They don't make them like that any more: the Yamaha DX7 keyboard

#161

Post by consf »

rvense wrote: post #96
coldtea wrote: post #18

> 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…

FM/PM synthesis makes no "logical sense"... until you spend the twenty minutes required to understand it. Really people gave up on the DX7 because of the limited interface, somehow FM got the blame. A subtractive synth with a knob for each function is a fantastically intuitive thing, but when it's three buttons and a line of abbrv txt it's not very nice either.

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Re: They don't make them like that any more: the Yamaha DX7 keyboard

#162

Post by consf »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #108

>These instruments were mostly of academic interest – I can’t think of any band that used one on stage (but I could be wrong). Very wrong. The Prophet 5, Oberheim 4/8 voice, Roland Jupiter 8, MemoryMoog, and especially the Yamaha CS80 were all available before the DX7, and very widely used on stage and in the studio. But they really were stupendously expensive - far too expensive for mere mortals. (There were also fu…

The key difference, though, as you pointed out, was the price. These analog synths were incredibly expensive, which limited their accessibility to major artists

Re: They don't make them like that any more: the Yamaha DX7 keyboard

#163

Post by consf »

_7acn wrote: post #91

But they still make great stuff like Korg Volca FM or Dirtywave M8 and many, many other beautiful synths! Apart from that, with music equipment, it's completely different than with computers. In our case, great hardware becomes outdated and goes out of use. You could say it disappears forever because its time has passed. With music equipment, it's entirely different. There, everything remains compatible, almost nothi…

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Re: They don't make them like that any more: the Yamaha DX7 keyboard

#165

Post by cesaref »

There was mention of the sound becoming 'dull' at the higher octaves. This is not a limitation of the DAC as was suggested, but caused by the phase modulation algorithm aliasing badly at the top of the range. Basically the modulation causes higher harmonics to appear in the output, and if these are higher than nyquist (half the sampling rate) they reflect back into the audible range, and produce unpleasant very digital sounding artifacts.

So, the DX designers avoid this by adding keyboard scaling for the operators - as you play higher up the keyboard, sounds could reduce the amount of modulation applied, and hence reduce the level of the aliases till they were inaudible. Unfortunately if done too aggressively, this will lead to a noticeable reduction in the harmonic complexity of the tone, which is perceived as a dull tone.

Re: They don't make them like that any more: the Yamaha DX7 keyboard

#166

Post by HerbieNeil »

All these erudite comments were fun to read. I can't help comparing with guitar enthusiasts who are looking out for really old Fenders and Gibsons to get the authentic old fashioned sounds. To my mind the value of a DX7 is just like that. It has a sound relevant to its time in history. It is what it was and has a soul of its own. Has time and technology produced more sophisticated instruments? Sure, but I don't think that's the point.

Re: They don't make them like that any more: the Yamaha DX7 keyboard

#167

Post by vunderba »

nine_k wrote: post #58
alfiedotwtf wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a MODX and although it’s so damn powerful when it comes to sound design - each of the 16 parts can have 8 layers each, it’s a lot of work to do anything with it. I’ve seen piano patches that sound REALISTIC because in 8 layers, you can model the hammer, the initial string hit, the cabinet echo, string resonance, and a whole lot of other timbres… but it takes SO MUCH EFFORT. So unless you’re a /real/ sound desi…

But what's the point of making piano patches that sound realistic, except as a tour de force? It's sort of a "Pierre Menard, author of Quixote" sort of thing. What I'd be interested in is how viable it is for producing intetesting, distinctive sounds, and tweaking them to your liking in a comprehensible way, not poking blindly.

yeah I don't know how about making one personally, but physical modeling (particularly Pianoteq) is near best-in-class if you want a highly realistic piano sound that you can then tweak to your personal preference over something more traditional like a Sampler lib such as Kontakt's The Gentleman.

Re: They don't make them like that any more: the Yamaha DX7 keyboard

#168

Post by vunderba »

ajxs wrote: post #11

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…

Dexed is great, and Arturia has another that is just as accurate.

https://www.arturia.com/products/software-instruments/dx7-v/...

Re: They don't make them like that any more: the Yamaha DX7 keyboard

#169

Post by cesaref »

On the subject of the DAC used, and why it was 'only' 12 bit. I believe the instrument actually runs all of the voices through a single DAC, so it is basically 16x oversampled, and the voices are held by a sample and hold circuit for all 16 voices before they are summed to the analog output.

If the later DX mark II is anything like the TX81z (which is also said to have a 16 bit DAC) it actually uses a 16 bit dynamic range DAC, but with a 10 bit resolution (a YM3012 for the TX - https://www.alldatasheet.com/datasheet-pdf/pdf/1179489/YAMAH...)

This is definitely the age of interesting DACs, with all sorts of interesting noise profiles. We're really spoilt these days with the quality from delta/sigma DACs, thinking that this has always been the case!

Re: They don't make them like that any more: the Yamaha DX7 keyboard

#170

Post by amelius »

Does anyone know a great mini (2 octaves or so) keyboard that is portable, fits in a backpack, has a built-in grand piano, touch sensitivity, and supports bluetooth?

EDIT: I found this [1], which comes close but does not have bluetooth.

[1] https://eu.loogguitars.com/products/loog-piano

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