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I would like to repsond to some points made by Victor in his review. I think he raises a number of interesting issues and they deserve an answer.
>But you DO know that you can't really harness >the power of FM with this box, right?
The FM engine in the DX200 is an uncompromised DX7 engine. Certainly you don't have every function assigned to a front pannel controler but the keyboard scaling and 8 point envelope are all there accessable through the computer editor.
This for me is a vast improvement over the DX7 - for the first time I have an FM synth at my disposal that offers similar real-time control to an analog - plus I have a much more accessable interface for deep programming than ever I had with the DX7. I find the use of ADSR knobs on the front pannel and 8 point evelopes in the engine a good compromise between space and complexity.
Similary the Harmonics control is well documented in manual. It is a kind of macro control that behaves differently for each algorithm - which in itself opens up sonic possibilities that were never there in the DX7.
I can't see the objection to macro controls on the hardware interface where the original synth had no controls at all (bar a data slider), provided all the subtlety of the DX7 engine is accessable to the programmer. It is.
>WHY have FM synthesis if you're only going to >use it like a subtractive?!?!
If you don't like the idea of a filter then turn it off. But there are several reasons why one might really want to use a filter - some filtration models such as modulated resonance and band pass / notch are quite hard to simulate with 6 op sine FM alone. Even if one does succeed then their timbral qualities of the result are very different to a good filter like the one in the DX200.
Yamaha took the same view when they created the FM monster: the FS1R synth. This despite the presence of 8 mulitple waveform operators ( roughly the equivalent of a 16 operator DX machine).
At the time of the release of the DX7 the machine did not include a digital filter since filters are quite expensive to implement digitally ( hence the really nasty ones that one heard upto the early 90s). Since FM can expand or contract the harmonic content of sounds by operator modulation the DX7 was it was a perectly viable synth with any filter at all. However this does not mean that now that we have very flexible multi-mode resonant digital filters we should not ever use one on an FM sound. That is just as unsustainable purist position as the Analogatollas who insists that no digital synth is worth the hearing.
>But for the $500 that the DX200 retails at, you >can pick up an MC-303 for your canned analog and >beats (vastly superior, if that's your thing), >and probably have enough left over to go pick up >a REAL DX7 at a garage sale for $100
Well precisely because the 303 and DX7 combination doesn't give you realtime control - nor the effects, nor the space, nor the effortless syncing.
The way to think of the DX200 is not really as a DX7 with knobs but as part of a little music system incuding percussion, synth, midi sync, effects sections, step sequencer and filter bank. Its a bit like an FM version of the Rebirth system.
The compact nature of the unit - you can virtually fit it in your pocket means you can walk to a gig and set up in less space than you take for an evening meal. That opens possiblities for music creation and performance that just arn't there with the set up suggested above.
Oh and did we mention that the DX200 sounds way better than the DX7. Considerably less aliasing. Must be 16 bit not 12 like the DX7.
I hope Yamaha have more success with it than they had with their FM masterpiece the FS1R which didn't even sell enough to recoup the RnD costs (although it has subequently become a cult object).
The DX200 sounds really novel after 6 years of nothing but VAs. I look forward to hearing what people create with it.
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