I don't think it's entirely fair to pin it on one instrument as being the cause of it, especially given how well some of the songs made with it have weathered the test of time.ĭigital sounds in popular music went through that backlash in the 90s and early 2000s. Later the Roland D50 appeared, with easier-to-create sounds, and the mainstream abandoned the DX7 and FM synthesis.Īs with all eras, there's always a backlash against sounds and genres as they become overplayed and predictable, and people start cashing in on it rather than making it for the love of it. The DX7 was used in massive amounts of songs until the people got tired of the presets ("why they didn't program it?" is another story worthy of an article). Later the DX5 was released - a stripped-down DX1, without the nice interface and no poly aftertouch. The DX7 wasn't the ultimate Yamaha, however The DX1 was the deluxe model, with polyphonic aftertouch, 32 voices, balanced outputs, weighted keys and a much more comprehensive interface. Thus this was a monster synth that sold like hot cakes, so much, that Yamaha couldn't keep up with demand and many musicians had to wait for one. The DX7 could do very decent electric pianos, and a very credible flute sound was included as well. This DX7 thing had 6 oscillators per voice (total = 96 oscillators) and 6 envelope generators per voice (total = 96 EGs) but no filters.Īlso, by that time almost no true synthesizer could give you a decent (credible) electric piano or flute sound.
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The typical analog substractive polysynth had two oscillators per voice (remember, 5 voices was "good", 8 voices was "deluxe" in the early 80s), one envelope generator per voice, and one filter. So in 1983 this DX7 synthesizer appears on the market, offering 16 (sixteen!) voices and 32 presets (expandable to 64 by use of a ROM cartridge) plus this new stuff called MIDI (that only two or three synths supported by that time). A typical popular polysynth of the era would be the Prophet-5, with 5 voices.Īlso, only the most expensive analog polysynths were velocity sensitive, and only one had aftertouch (the sublime Yamaha CS-80 and the Yamaha GX1).įinally, the analog synthesizers that had no DCO (digitally controlled oscillators) could have some tuning problems due to temperature changes, etc. It appeared in 1983 in a world of mostly-analog synthesizers that had polyphony limited to 8 voices (at hugely expensive prices for an 8 voice model!) and a limited amount of presets.
The DX7 was the first affordable fully digital synthesizer on the market. Just in case somebody wants to know what is a DX7. On the 'net, many claim the DX1 and DX5 sounded much more cleaner (not just "less background noise" but "sweeter sound") i wish we could aim for that.
On the other hand, i play the hardware DX7 (the real thing) plus a DX7IIFD, and i'd rather have the developers produce a cleaner version of the DX7, with a much larger/longer sine table, and more nuances to the sound. If you, as a DX7 clone developer, want to make happy these 2 or 3 people too, please, use fixed point calculations, resampling, real ROM data and so on :)
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> Most of software versions of DX7 don't take these nuances in account which makes some DX7 purists upset. Thus the dynamic range available was much higher than just 12-bit. There was a 12-bit DAC chip, but additionally to those 12 bits there are additional bits that are fed to another DAC (implemented using resistors) in charge of doing "gain-ranging" (that is, adjusting the output level of that channel). Also DX7 had sampling rate of 49096 Hz, 12-bit "floating-point" DACs etc etc.