The presets are fair but it's fairly easy to program (no DX7 by any means) and it's capable of lots of cool tricks for the inventive synthisist.

It's a sound synth, not a gigging synth... big difference (unless oyu have a rodaie who'll lug this beast around for you).

This is the only hard synth in my studio now (gone the VST route) because the sound is so damn thick! Plus it's like a good friend... always there when I need it. I would pick one up immediately if something were to happen it.

Ok, time for me to get my hands on the UC-16 to DW8000 conversion program!!

Best... Scott

I just got the UC-16 specifically to use with this synth. Unfortunately after unpacking it and hooking it up to the DW8000, the synth continuously ignored every numeric CC setting that was sent to it. Lo and behold after some net researching, I discovered that the DW8000 does not accept CC's, it only understands proprietary sysex strings to control the parameters. (Duh! I should have already realized that! - the Juno 106 from the same time period does the same thing, it was years before CC's were established as a standard).

After almost throwing in the towel, I discovered a nifty little utility called Bome's MIDI Translator. This will translate the incoming CC's from the UC-16 and translate them to sysex strings that you define. Then came a couple of hours with the DW8000 manual, pulling my hair out converting binary numbers to HEX, and putting these into the translator. Presto! Now I have instant 'knobby' control over 16 of the DW8000's parameters!! You can also store more 'setups' so that you can get to another 16 parameters at the press of a button! This combination of DW8000 synth and Evolution UC-16 hardware controller is just too cool for words. Just get a ripping bass arpeggio going on the DW, and twirl those knobs!

The MIDI translation for a single parameter (e.g., resonance) looks something like this:

UC-16: B0 12 oo DW-8000: F0 42 31 1D oo F7

Not exactly those numbers, just giving you the idea (the "oo" represents the variable control data when you turn the knob.) Since I have already spent some effort creating this DW8000 parameter map for the UC-16, just e-mail me if you're interested and I will send you a copy. You will need to download a copy of Bome's MIDI Translator to use it.

The only downside to this arrangement is having to have a laptop running between the controller and the synth just to do the small job of MIDI translating, but I am always using the laptop for other MIDI applications in my setup anyway, so it's no big hassle, and the translator program will run in the background and use up very little resources.

Besides using the UC-16 for control of the DW8000, I have also tried it with the VAZ Modular software synth (which is much easier to set up since VAZ recognizes CC's), and that works like a charm too.

The posting by "Vince, a part time user" should be summarily ignored. If 80's sounds bother him, he should learn how to program a synth. (My DW8000 is full of 70's and 90's sounds because I dumped most of the presets and created my own patches.) Here is a guy who probably picks up a synth, tries out a few presets, and goes thumbs up or down based on that. No discussion at all about synthesis or how the thing actually works. My purpose as a musician is to recommend a good instrument to other musicians; Vince's is to play tastemaker to collectors who really don't know how to play or work any of these instruments anyway (probably like Vince himself).

The DW8000 does not qualify as a "rompler" because a rompler is essentially a keyboard with samples burned into ROM (SAMPLES: being complete recordings of an actual sound event, with complex waveform harmonics evolving over several seconds). The DW8000 has none of this. If we want to call the DW8000's digital oscillator a "sample" (for the sake of argument), it is nothing more than a tiny fraction of a second worth of unlooped sample ... just enough to create a kind of raw material to be processed via analog synthesis. Another point (actually missed by the aforementioned anonymous poster, whom I respect) is that a separate "sample" is used for each octave on each of the 16 waveforms, and the waveforms are actually recreated using additive harmonic synthesis. So what you are hearing in the DW8000's oscillators is, in fact, real-time additive synthesis that gets its component parts from tiny fraction-of-a-second "samples" built into ROM. What sets it apart from a purely digital synthesizer like the DX7 is that none of this additive synthesis is editable.

One last point: I never said (or implied) that the DW8000 is the "best synth ever" - I certainly don't think so myself. But I do think it's the best of its type you can get for that price, very much so - and the most important implication of this is that the actual benefit you get from a "better" synth costing 6 times as much is indeed very little.