First, I never said it was the "number one thing" so don't put words in my mouth. In fact, I said that it would have probably made it an unsuccessful product, although a much better synthesizer. Talking about effects is silly, integrated effects weren't really possible in the very early eighties whereas analog filters were. So you aren't even in the realm of practical possibility. Digital effects were very much in their infancy and the vast majority of products were analog. Even synths that did have effects had a very limited set. Mostly chorus until, AFAIK, Korg packaged digital delay into the DW series.MadBrain wrote:ghettosynth wrote:I think that there is a big difference between talking about a synth vs a product. Even in the 80s, the DX7 WAS overestimated as a synth. The belief that it could recreate any sound, in theory, simply didn't hold up in practice. It would have been a much better synth with analog filters, although, that would most likely have limited its success as a product.I don't think adding filters is the #1 most "effective" thing you could add to the DX7 to improve the sound... The problem is that filters are really something you use for controlling brightness, and FM already does that, so it's kinda redundant on most FM sounds (although you get resonance which is otherwise very hard to do).ghettosynth wrote:Not relevant. I simply said that it would have been a better synth with filters and that since it did not have filters, it was overestimated as there was a common belief, as you so clearly articulated, that they weren't necessary. Chowning's goals were academic, I understand that POV, it has jack all to do with whether or not a hybrid architecture is a better tool. It clearly is "as a synthesizer."
The fact that you aren't aware of the FS1R simply speaks to your own ignorance of the development of FM.
Second, you can't elevate FM and dismiss the qualities of filters in the same breath. The shitty filters on my JD800 and the SSM2040 in my Octave CAT are both low pass filters, but I assure you that they are vastly different in terms of quality and this matters quite a bit in obtaining interesting sounds. In any case, both sound more like an actual resonant filter than the overwhelming majority of weak efforts that you hear in many FM patches.
Yeah, I think that we all understand here, some more than others, Chowning's original intent and how Yamaha capitalized on that. What it seems many don't seem to understand is that FM does "filter emulation", if you want to call it that, very badly. You can reduce harmonics and you can try to add the harmonics that resonance adds, and you can even try to make this all frequency dependent in your modulation structure, but, you'll fail to make it sound like it would with a great filter and that's assuming that you have the complexity in the FM engine to begin with. In practice, in point of fact, you don't. If it were so easy, we would have lots of VA synths today that were FM under the hood. So, it absolutely makes a better synth to have great filters to make up for FM's implementation shortcomings.In fact, the whole point of how the DX7 is designed is to be able to control brightness without having to add another separate chip for each and every voice.
The "point" of how the DX7 was designed was to take advantage of large scale integration and to dispense with per/voice hardware which dramatically reduced the costs over time of synth production. Incorporating any per voice logic would have caused the costs to balloon because you would have to do that processing in the analog domain which means 16 DA converters. If you still wanted to do stereo processing after the fact then that would mean additional complexity. So no matter what Yamaha actually felt about FM's capabilities were rather moot because the technology to implement digital filters just wasn't there and analog was out of the question from a cost point of view. Given that, of course they are going to sell this idea that you don't need filters.
If you don't think that the cost of technology drove the design of the entire DX line then you're just being naive. When it became cheap to add filters, i.e., in the digital domain, that's exactly what Yamaha did.
