Re: Synthesis (was Re:Amelio's ouster)

[spec@vax2.concordia.ca (Mitchell Spector)]

In article Geoff Kaiser <SuperKais@MacConnect.com> writes...

>Not to burst anyone's bubble, but being a Roland fan as I am, I had to
>jump in and say that as much as I love the sound that somes out of my
>Roland keyboards (and the Sound Canvas has some really great sounds,
>too), these are NOT true synthesizers. They are integrating PCM samples
>into these patches. There are absolutely no tones being generated from
>scratch like in a true digital synth, like say, the Roland JD-800. 

    The patches are ROM based, rather than loaded into a dedicated
sound RAM. It is still generating tones from these patches, and 
thus a true synthesizer more or less.

>THAT's why these MIDI modules sound so much "like a live orchestra";
>it's because they're using elements of the real thing. 

    That is what wavetable synthesis is all about, "using elements of
the real thing". You digitally record a real-life instrument (a sax,
piano, guitar, drum, etc) and use that waveform as a basis for the 
synthesized instrument.

>Well guess what? The Macintosh software-based synth in QuickTime 2.5
>uses Roland Sound Canvas sounds. Surprise! And in version 3.0 some
>Yamaha sounds are due to be added.

    The same Roland and Yamaha plug-in exist for the PC, so you can
"emulate" these hardrive synthesizers through software mixing. This
is nothing new. More more on that below...

>And as far as that goes, it doesn't matter if you're using a hardware 
>Roland card/box or QuickTime 2.5 w/Roland's sounds online, it still 
>amounts to the same sounds. 

    Wrong. I have a real Roland SCC-1 and listened the the SCC-1 
plug-in, doing software mixing on a 166 MHz Pentium with 83 MHz
bus speed. While it does sound close, it is not exactly the same.
Besides which, even on this extremely fast system, it eats up alot
of CPU time (especially if your emulating reverb and chorus effects
too). 

    Software mixing taxes your CPU, not a good thing if you want
to do anything besides listening to a MIDI file (which will not
sound exactly like a hardware based synthesizer in any case).

Mitchell Spector
spec@vax2.concordia.ca