DSI Rev2

[illintechnology]

Announced at NAMM was the Rev 2 from Dave Smith Instruments, everything the Prophet 08 has, plus a lot more (wave shaping, effects, USB MIDI I/O, more powerful sequencing options, etc). I really love the sound of the Prophet 08 but since it didn't have a strong multi functionality I parted ways with it and am now using a DSI Tetra instead because with it, at least I can can play with note-per-channel with each of the four voices.

My dream is to have an 8 (or 16) voice analog polysynth with tetra-timbrality (or octa-timbrality) and be able to use the Y on my Linnstument to "crossfade" between a two-voice stack.

The Rev 2 would also give me mod matrix assignable effects parameters that I could expressively control with Y and Z control as well.

After reading the specs, I don't see any mention of MFE/Channel-Per-Note/multi capability.

Anyone have the inside scoop?

If they make a keyboardless version (something DSI thankfully nearly always does) and if it does MPE/Channel-Per-Note, I'm definitely going to get one.

[Rimwolf]

I'm pretty sure that Rev 2, like the 08 "rev 1", is just bi-timbral, where you can split or layer half the voices with the other half (4+4 or 8+8).

[illintechnology]

Yeah. A bummer. Missed opportunity indeed.

[SneakyT]

Roger should give Dave grief for not supporting MPE yet the next time they meet up for coffee.

[cramern]

I know it may be a niche market but there are definitely people looking for hardware synths to use with their MPE enabled controllers. It seems like a lot of people here appreciate DSI's products to the point where we would like to use our Linnstruments with them. While this may not boost their sales by an incredible amount, it's worth considering whether the work required to implement MPE into their existing line would be worth it, and I imagine it would be. If the implementation doesn't require much, and their products became recognizable for expressive playing, it could only serve to help them, right? Their modules would be perfect alongside a Linnstrument.

[SneakyT]

I agree completely. I would've thought that Dave would have been the first to implement it knowing his history with MIDI and relationship with Roger but I guess I can understand letting a new standard gain a bit of momentum before you spend a bunch of time implementing it. Let others work out the bugs a bit. I really have no Idea how hard it would be to implement in the hardware world so there may be some (unknown to us) roadblocks with his current designs and staying profitable has to be your first concern when it comes to running a smaller business.

[Roger_Linn]

MPE is more trickier to implement in a hardware synth. But also, given that most of his customers buy all-in-one keyboard synths, they're demanding lots of other features that they value more than MPE.

One of the great things about having ROLI as a friendly competitor is that their larger numbers are causing more people to demand MPE, so I'm sure Dave and other hardware makers will add MPE at some point. Hardware always changes more slowly than software.

[illintechnology]

While people with MPE/ch-per-note controllers are rare, I would assume people that would buy an 8 or 16 voice synth might also expect it to be more than 2Xtimbral.

The SCI Six-Trak is 6Xtimbral
The DSI Prophet 08 is 2Xtimbral
The DSI Tetra is 4xtimbral.
The DSI Prophet Rev2 is, most likely, also only 2Xtimbral.

Of course, building patches and then assigning the same voice to a different MIDI channel to make a ch-per-voice multi is a PITA, but it *works*. Editing the multi after its created requires editing each individual voice identically, but once a multi is built, performance works pretty great, in my opinion.

Hypothesizing here, but if 8-16Xtimbrality was possible hardware-wise, it might just be a software improvement to make easier MPE patch building/editing. Specifically, while in multi/combo/ch-per-voice/MPE mode making an edit to the voice would make the edits to ALL voices in the multi/combo. Currently with a multi, if you edit a patch at all, it only changes the copy of the patch that was put into one of the voice slots. This exposes the need for two different types of combo/multi modes. I'm sure when DSI multi-mode/combos were developed, the idea was that each voice in a combo could be intentionally different so each voice could be used for different sounds.

If there was a second combo/multi mode specifically for MPE/ch-per-note, a user could assign a patch to ALL of a combo, rather than cloning patches to each slot of a combo then an edit of that patch would be respected by all consumers of that patch.

It seems that new-comer Futuresonus is taking MPE/ch-per-note seriously with their Parva synth module. I would rather have a DSI synth, but may go with the Parva instead.

[Roger_Linn]

You're entirely correct, but I don't think it changes the response I gave before.