Roland Cloud

[N 4 LIFE]

already removed the Earth Piano. IMHO, it sounds awful.

I can't believe they did a piano. If all you want/need is a basic piano sound that's buried in a mix the pianos in the XV5080, SRX, and Zenology are actually quite good

Especially the ones Eric Persing made for the dedicated SRX cards AGREE

I played out so many gigs back in the day with "64 Voice Piano" from the JV1080. I often layered it with the EP patch from my DX7 and/or Fantasia from my D50 YUP ME TOO

But it seems like they are going to have more acoustic instruments come out since "Earth" is now a category in RCM SAD!!!

Makes me wonder if there will be a hardware Roland "Earth" instrument

I wish they would just make the Supernatural Piano engine from Integra7 or the engine from V-Piano that's in the RD line in plugin form

Yeah, that Earth piano is nowhere close to as good as many of the old pianos by Roland. Been waiting for a Supernatural AU/VST for years. Who wants EARTH? I think we would all prefer SUPERNATURAL!

[Septic Underground]

Yeah, that Earth piano is nowhere close to as good as many of the old pianos by Roland. Been waiting for a Supernatural AU/VST for years. Who wants EARTH? I think we would all prefer SUPERNATURAL!

I cant help getting this song in my head when I read your post

.

[bmanic]

The point was this, in case you missed it:

Emulating the DAC in the context of a JP-8000 would make a difference compared to just the straight digital output of the synth algorithm itself. Would it be a big enough difference to matter for most people? Probably not, but it would be a difference, one that can be heard in an ABX test.. aka not placebo. And as mentioned before, the difference only grows larger once you start processing the end result.

I did get it and I 100% disagree, take a 1990s era CD player, and then take a brand new one

Play the same CD in both through the same amp and same speakers

Fine, you are allowed to disagree. I can of course not judge your abilities or hearing.

You will not have any perceived difference

.. but YOU have no place to say what I can or can not hear. That's just plain arrogant (or purely ignorant as I suspect in this case). Like I said, I've done the ABX tests, I've done even double blind tests (where I was not the one setting up the test nor presenting the results) so I know very well what I can hear.

You are entitled to your opinion just as anybody else. I'm just here to put some damper on your "facts" that you seem to deem universal truths, just in case somebody happens to stumble upon this thread and for some reason wants to learn something.

Try this: Run any piece of music through your soundcard then back into the inputs.. then do this like 3 times

If you have to run audio multiple times through a DAC as you suggest then in the real world there is no difference and it's a pointless exercise.

I gave the 3 times loopback as an example for people who have a hard time with critical listening. Doing it 3 times around and then post processing, the differences become quite obvious. Hence the suggestion.

And for the record I have a 1990s era CD player and a Windows 98 machine I built in 1999 do you?

No, never.. I mean my first computer I bought last year. I've never built any computers nor have any idea what a CD player is.. and I never heard about Windows 98. What is that? Some kind of game?

Anyhow, this has ran it's course. You are obviously here just to argue while I was originally here to simply educate.

[adamszabo]

So what do you think - are DSP designs lost, or is Roland holding them back for some reason?
They released JD-800, so why not JP-8000 if they have complete documentation and firmware.

What IvyBirds said, he knows his stuff and I believe him! My theory is also about the huge amount of resources needed to do a 100% complete faithful emulation, and I think they dont see it as a priority since they basically covered the supuersaw sound in other products already in their new hardwares and software like zencore, etc...

[Examigan]

The point was this, in case you missed it:

Emulating the DAC in the context of a JP-8000 would make a difference compared to just the straight digital output of the synth algorithm itself. Would it be a big enough difference to matter for most people? Probably not, but it would be a difference, one that can be heard in an ABX test.. aka not placebo. And as mentioned before, the difference only grows larger once you start processing the end result.

I did get it and I 100% disagree, take a 1990s era CD player, and then take a brand new one

Play the same CD in both through the same amp and same speakers

You will not have any perceived difference

Try this: Run any piece of music through your soundcard then back into the inputs.. then do this like 3 times

If you have to run audio multiple times through a DAC as you suggest then in the real world there is no difference and it's a pointless exercise.

And for the record I have a 1990s era CD player and a Windows 98 machine I built in 1999 do you?

I remember the first CD players for stereo setups way back in the day, so I guess I'm a dinosaur.
I didn't buy one right away, they were expensive! I think I "bought in" the 2nd year or maybe the 3rd year they were around, not sure.

One thing I remember was when a song was fading in or out (no matter what CD it was) I could hear some audio degradation as the amplitude changed, basically it was breaking down in quality as it faded away in a track. But I didn't hear that at all on a newer model player I bought about 3 years after that one. Maybe that new one was using oversampling and the first one didn't?

[IvyBirds]

.. but YOU have no place to say what I can or can not hear.....Anyhow, this has ran it's course. You are obviously here just to argue while I was originally here to simply educate.

What's hilarious is you are the one arguing with me about silly things

Again when it came to mid to late 1990s era consumer DACs that were used in CD and DVD players (and many Japanese Synt) there is no magic there they didn't contribute any real color to the sound

So to hilariously prove that idea wrong I am supposed to round robin a digital signal 3x out of my DAC converting a digital signal into an analog one, then convert that again through an Analog to Digital signal and repeat the process 3x then use a limiter or compressor to make the difference obvious

Along the way, I need to hope and pray that the preamp and A/D convertors in my interface don't color the sound and that small errors in the digital conversion processes don't get amplified

And if I pull that off, that is supposed to prove that mid to late 1990s consumer DACs were somehow adding all sorts of color and magic mojo that Roland should waste your CPU cycles emulating

And if I don't do all that, it means that I am somehow insulting you and telling you what you can hear or not hear while you are wasting time testing gear that is not relevant to subject matter at hand

But somehow you have magically been able to go back in time and do blind tests between different DACs used in different 1996 era consumer electronics

FWIW I was a sales manager in the late 1990s for a high end home theater store that also did repairs

One day we tested out about 15 different CD players that ranged in price from bargain basement to super high end price points

We used a high quality Amp and high quality speakers in our treated home theater demo room which was THX certified (we sold and installed high end THX certified home theater systems and had a treated room to demo in)

There was no difference any one of us could tell. Zero, nada, zilch none

Speakers made a difference, amps made a difference but the actual CD players and the DACs inside did not

After all they were just reading the same digital file off the CD and converting it to an analog voltage that went out to amp. They did that in a very transparent way which is what they were designed to do

[IvyBirds]

I remember the first CD players for stereo setups way back in the day, so I guess I'm a dinosaur.
I didn't buy one right away, they were expensive! I think I "bought in" the 2nd year or maybe the 3rd year they were around, not sure.

One thing I remember was when a song was fading in or out (no matter what CD it was) I could hear some audio degradation as the amplitude changed, basically it was breaking down in quality as it faded away in a track. But I didn't hear that at all on a newer model player I bought about 3 years after that one. Maybe that new one was using oversampling and the first one didn't?

I was selling them back then, so I guess I am even more of a dinosaur lol

Yeah the first few years of CD players were pretty rough, by the time we got into the late 80s and into the 90s they got much better and by the time the mid-late 90s came along they all got really good from a sound standpoint. It was features like disc changing, anti skip systems, etc that made the difference

They along with DAT and MINI disk meant that factories in Asia could crank out lots of the standard parts by the millions

[martiu]

reel tape best

[beely]

FWIW I was a sales manager in the late 1990s for a high end home theater store that also did repairs

One day we tested out about 15 different CD players that ranged in price from bargain basement to super high end price points

There was no difference any one of us could tell. Zero, nada, zilch none

Yep, I worked in a hifi shop in the early 90s so we had all the gear. CD's players were mostly all decent by then, although there was still a lot of short-cutting in digital audio implementations that involved computers through the 90s resulting in some bad sounding stuff. But hifi, excepting the newer lossy stuff like Minidisc and DCC, when it came to CD, if anything was going to significantly change the sound you heard it wouldn't be the DAC in the CD player doing it. (The 80s was a bigger crapshoot as companies were still learning how to do this stuff.)

However, don't equate to the output stages of hifi gear (which had a large, global market) with the output stages of digital synths (which by comparison had a tiny market). Implementations are always a choice of components, design, cost, and what they are required to do.

Take the Korg Wavestation as an example, which I'm very familiar with - still the early 90s, digital chips still couldn't do decent resonant filter implementations (which is why the Wavestation/M1/D50/SY77 etc didn't have them). If you compare the hardware, going through the DAC, with the software, you can easily hear the loss in fidelity, grunginess, slightly "defocused" nature of the output, compared to the raw, higher quality, non-DAC software versions, which really reveal what the sources and the engine are doing. It's quite a nice sound, but it's in no way "transparent" to the source or the engine.

By the late nineties, things had mostly got pretty good in terms of digital and digital processing - better quality and cheaper components, properly implemented algorithms etc, and from that point, any DAC modelling is largely pointless from my point of view. But for instruments where their inherent sound quality is favoured and loved, it probably does make sense to do this, which is why things like the weird implementations of classic early drum machines, the output stages of early samplers like the S950, even some digital effects like the Eventide H3000 and other things were factored in and modelled for various products.

For things like the JP8000, should they model the output stages, I'd say it wouldn't be something I cared about personally. I'd quite like the output stage of the Wavestation to be modelled though, as it was a quality I liked and while overall I prefer the higher fidelity of the plugin, and can find other ways to rough it up, the original sounding option would be nice.

There are ever other things where the output stages are much better and actually *add* something to the source. My XV-5080, for example, over the digital I/O sounds essentially identical to the plugin version, but from the analog outputs, just sounds sweeter. Again here, the output stage (which may involve more than just the DAC of course), is not being accurate to the source, it's colouring it in an attractive way. And for instruments that do this, again, it would be nice to have it as an option in a plugin model.

But these are all small things, and not super important compared to getting other aspects of modelled instruments right, in my opinion anyway... Eg Arturia modelled the quirks of the Casio CZ DAC and included it as an option in their CZ-V plugin - I can't say it has a massive effect on the sound...

[Cochrane]

Take the Korg Wavestation as an example, which I'm very familiar with - still the early 90s, digital chips still couldn't do decent resonant filter implementations (which is why the Wavestation/M1/D50/SY77 etc didn't have them).

SY77 HAS digital RESONANT filters, and they are pretty decent for that era...

[beely]

SY77 HAS digital RESONANT filters, and they are pretty decent for that era...

All these implementations were weak or flawed/faked implementations because the chips couldn't (yet) do it properly. They all did varying workarounds to sort of get there - the D50 used processing of the VA waveforms to get a filtering effect, the Wavestation had a non-resonant filter that could process samples but it was pretty weak sounding, and they offered resonant waveforms, and a digital FX algorithm to try to counter it. The Wavestation designers talked about the lack of good filtering options because the Yamaha chips they had to use at the time just couldn't do it. Any digital filter implementations just weren't great back then for processing power reasons.

I'm less familiar with the SY series as I never had one, but afaicr only the FM signals can go through it's filter, it can't send the samples through the filter*, because again, the chips couldn't do that. How exactly they implemented their filters I don't know, but if they were standard filters that could operate on sample data, they'd be able to run the PCM waves through them too.

* But let me know if I'm wrong on that

Could you run the samples through the filter in the SY99? That was a little bit upgraded in engine terms over the SY77 I remember... (I can't go a re-read the reviews right now...)

Edit: Internet says the SY99 used the same chips as the SY77 in regards to the filtering options, so not much changes in that regard between them

So I don't mean there weren't synths with digital filters around those times, I mean that the chips simply couldn't do properly implemented (ie, what I meant by the use of the term "decent" in my above post) good analog/VA-style resonant filtering at that point - that would come later in the decade as VA's started to happen. Digital filtering was weak sauce, if a synth at that time had digital filters at all.

[Cochrane]

SY77 HAS digital RESONANT filters, and they are pretty decent for that era...

I'm less familiar with the SY series as I never had one, but afaicr only the FM signals can go through it's filter, it can't send the samples through the filter*, because again, the chips couldn't do that. How exactly they implemented their filters I don't know, but if they were standard filters that could operate on sample data, they'd be able to run the PCM waves through them too.

* But let me know if I'm wrong on that

Could you run the samples through the filter in the SY99? That was a little bit upgraded in engine terms over the SY77 I remember... (I can't go a re-read the reviews right now...)

Edit: Internet says the SY99 used the same chips as the SY77 in regards to the filtering options, so not much changes in that regard between them

Sorry, but:
1) in SY-77/99 you can process AFM and AWM (multi-sampled) elements through its 12/24 db/oct resonant filter
2) SY-99 filters are improved compared to SY-77
3) for those old times, SY-series filters are considered years ahead competitors: I heard an incredible rendition of ELP's "Tarkus" done totally on SY-77 by italian Yamaha's guru Antonino Valenti, and at the demo, everyone present rolled off their chairs at the initial moog-style sweep.

[beely]

1) in SY-77/99 you can process AFM and AWM (multi-sampled) elements through its 12/24 db/oct resonant filter

Ok cool, thanks for the correction. How good sounding is the filter? Is it a fairly character-less bland digital filter, or does it sound more like you'd expect a proper VA-style filter to sound? As I say, I'm not sure of the implementation. I'll have a look over of the reviews from the time on the filters to refresh my memory...

I know the chips used in the M1 and Wavestation, which came from Yamaha (as Yamaha partially-owned Korg them at the time), couldn't do any (decent) digital filtering at all (just the usual weak stuff), and pre-SY77, most of Yamaha's synth stuff was FM so likely their PCM stuff wasn't that advanced until they started to introduce this on the SY77.

It's possible that the generation of chips they were using for the M1 were from before the SY77, and that Yamaha's first digital filters were developed for that, of course.

2) SY-99 filters are improved compared to SY-77

I read that there were more filter types in the SY99, but not so much that the existing ones are improved (I've not had more than a few moments of hands on time with the SY77 or SY99, so I don't really directly know how they sound firsthand).

3) for those old times, SY-series filters are considered years ahead competitors

I certainly don't recall that perception at the time. Living through those times, digital filters were generally regarded as weak and uninspiring, and often not available at all (ie, the original use of the term rompler, where you just had samples, no filter, no synth engine).

[Cochrane]

1) in SY-77/99 you can process AFM and AWM (multi-sampled) elements through its 12/24 db/oct resonant filter

Ok cool, thanks for the correction. How good sounding is the filter? Is it a fairly character-less bland digital filter, or does it sound more like you'd expect a proper VA-style filter to sound? As I say, I'm not sure of the implementation. I'll have a look over of the reviews from the time on the filters to refresh my memory...

for me it was the first moog-like vibe I had from a digital synth. At those times, in '89, it was really a big achievement.

I know the chips used in the M1 and Wavestation, which came from Yamaha (as Yamaha partially-owned Korg them at the time), couldn't do any (decent) digital filtering at all (just the usual weak stuff), and pre-SY77, most of Yamaha's synth stuff was FM so likely their PCM stuff wasn't that advanced until they started to introduce this on the SY77.

I confirm that SY-77 digital filter is a really total new development, beside the fact that previous TX-16W digital sampler was the first with filter tables loadable from floppy and also the testbed for SY-77/85/99 next development stage in Yamaha.

It's possible that the generation of chips they were using for the M1 were from before the SY77, and that Yamaha's first digital filters were developed for that, of course.

Yes, it's true. And it's true that Korg was for a brief time owned by Yamaha, but speaking with some Korg PMs, I was told that R&D was separated, so I don't know if "M1 used Yamaha filters" (it's the first time I hear a similar thing...)

2) SY-99 filters are improved compared to SY-77

I read that there were more filter types in the SY99, but not so much that the existing ones are improved (I've not had more than a few moments of hands on time with the SY77 or SY99, so I don't really directly know how they sound firsthand).

http://www.muzines.co.uk/articles/yamaha-sy99/7493

FILTERS

The filters have also been improved: they are slightly smoother at high resonance values, and when set fully open they colour the sound less significantly than on the SY77. The combination of high quality effects, the new 'Pad' AWM waveforms and the filters makes the SY99 sound more 'analogue' than ever. When you are editing the filters, there is now an extra softkey called 'Sync' which automatically copies any changes to both filters.

3) for those old times, SY-series filters are considered years ahead competitors

I certainly don't recall that perception at the time. Living through those times, digital filters were generally regarded as weak and uninspiring, and often not available at all (ie, the original use of the term rompler, where you just had samples, no filter, no synth engine).

This is NOT the case of the SY series.
Trust me: SY77/99 are a really different beasts. Even for today's standards.
I suggest you to have a look at the thread about the much anticipated SWAY SY-77 modeled plugin by Sheaf, and the hype of the old time users of TG/SY-77:

viewtopic.php?t=605810

Maybe, asking to Sheaf details on SY's filter, you will be convinced of the really improved design and sound of it compared to competitors of that times...old times...

Cheers,
Cochrane

[IvyBirds]

However, don't equate to the output stages of hifi gear (which had a large, global market) with the output stages of digital synths (which by comparison had a tiny market). Implementations are always a choice of components, design, cost, and what they are required to do.

Take the Korg Wavestation as an example, which I'm very familiar with - still the early 90s,

The JP8000s which I was referring to isn't from the early 1990s it was announced in late 1996 and came out in early 1997, and if you look at the service manual has the same exact DAC and analog output circuits as a consumer CD player, DAT, and DVD player (DVD players came out in 1996)

The only difference was the output stage was soldered to 1/4" Female TS jacks instead of RCA as would have been on a CD or DVD player. It was +10db also just like other consumer electronics

In earlier 1990s era synths that was not the case like on the Wavestation