Comment by stfwn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stfwn | Hacker News Reader

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Hm, I don't agree fully. There is zero hardware innovation for digital keyboards at least. Some old electronic instruments are 'vintage'; what makes a Moog is the vintage Moog sound, so yes, you can't upgrade from there. But most digital tools are not instruments in that sense and definitely have the corporate gadget-marketing schemes going on.

- Yamaha's Motif XS has some sounds that were adopted as signature sounds for some subgenres of funk, soul and gospel, but these are just samples that the upgraded versions XF, MX, MOXF have as well for this reason, and I don't see anyone with the XS anymore.

- Nord clearly limits the features, storage and processing power of each keyboard they release so that they can upgrade it slightly the following year (the latest 2018 flagship model has 480MB of sample memory vs. the preceding 2015 model's 380MB).

- Korg rereleased the Kronos with an SSD instead of a HDD and marketed it as a new machine. You could open it up and DIY for 80 bucks and save yourself ~$1.5k+ upgrade costs.

- Roland still slaps the Juno brand name on random iterations of digital instruments that just have an extra button for this or that function that could have been added with a software update if they wanted to.

New digital keyboards these days are just software updates that model familiar sounds slightly better, packaged in "new" hardware. The $3.5k pricetag for flagship keyboards that have barely changed in size/shape/material for years is a clear sign. I wonder why no manufacturer has just come out and said "this is our flagship keyboard until 2030, buy it for $2k and subscribe to software updates for $10/month" or "new software verson at $100 every year". That way what buyer's pay for would be much more closely connected to what they are actually getting.

You're just describing stage keyboards. I'll grant you that there is zero innovation there. But that's because the customers in that market want a very simple thing which is essentially a commodity, to which the market has converged. It's like complaining that the market for peanut butter has no innovation.

Some historic digital innovation. It seems to me that almost everything PPG and Waldorf ever made or makes would be considered innovative, including the upcoming Kyra. Other innovative digital synths would include the VS and Wavestation family; the Fizmo, Morpheus, UltraProteus, and Proteus 2000; the FS1R; and perhaps the Prophet X. And I must grudgingly admit that the MicroKorg was innovative given what they crammed in there for the price.

I'll grant you that most of those devices are two decades old. The current incentive for innovation (and hence risk) for digital devices has been destroyed by software synthesizers and laptops. Most digital stuff nowadays has gone for cheap rather than new, in the hopes of going after the poor musician. Monologue, Monotribe, Volca, Reface, Boutique. I don't know if that's bad, but it does make me sad.

What about Minilogue XD then? Does its extensibility count for being innovative?

It seems to me that the Minilogue XD is just a stripped down Prologue. The Prologue is fairly prosaic (and largely analog, since we were talking about digital) -- being largely 8 Monologues in a box. Except for one item, the programmable oscillator facility. That is definitely innovative. Extensibility is pretty interesting; of course, it's been done before (Mutable, etc.), but not on this scale.

Exactly. The stage keyboard is dead innovation wise. The synth market is alive and well. The whole modular boom, Korg's analogs, Moog and smaller vendors are making exciting stuff.

What really flummoxes me is how my Yamaha SY99, which is a digital FM synth from 1991 with 512kb of memory and, by modern standards, a tiny, tiny CPU, manages to do things that are really CPU intensive on a normal OS (like large plate reverb, tons of polyphony, on 12 tracks at a time) without ever lagging. The only real limit I've hit on it is loading in proper samples, versus waveforms, though this[1] insane project seems to have hacked memory expansion boards for the old SY/TG random. This is a piece of purely digital equipment that is now 27 years old, and yet my phone doesn't last for more than 2 years without feeling obsolete.

Why is this? I've always wondered if these golden-age hardware FM synths provide any benefits over software (people talk about the super HQ DACs, etc., but I'm not sure if I buy that these components are better than modern commodity equipment?). The thing is, to my ear, the SY99/SY77 etc. do sound a lot better than e.g. Dexed or FM8, but is that just because Yamaha patented a bunch of the FM algos and architectures, and, with a retail price of £3,000 in 1991, they put more care into a complete end product than a VST FM developer realistically would? Or, can really low memory, low CPU, super purpose-built hardware somehow win against a modern OS?

[1] https://www.sector101.co.uk/waveblade.html

> manages to do things that are really CPU intensive on a normal OS

Dedicated circuits.

This isn't all in CPU - the CPU on these synths mainly sets parameters for the sound generating chips.

not the same chips, but something like this probably:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_chip#Yamaha_2

>

The best-known Yamaha FM synth chips don't even have analog output; they pair with a separate DAC chip.

Modern systems largely sacrifice consistent latency for more throughput and more energy efficiency. This leads to modern systems being able to do much more, but also having frequent little responsiveness hiccups and occasional larger hiccups. If you want to do a smaller job consistently, a simpler embedded system architecture is still the way to go. This is especially true when doing any kind of low-level signal generation, whether it be audio, video, or control.

As for the sound, I don't think Yamaha's implementation of "FM" [1] has been comprehensively reverse-engineered in the way that, say, the Commodore SID has. There are a lot of little quirks and edge cases to take into account when considering the full operational ranges of the various chips. Even MAME's implementation is allegedly distinguishable even after 20 years of tweaking and testing against hundreds of games, and I imagine most VSTs are using significantly less mature code.

[1] I recall reading that the actual implementation is phase modulation because directly doing FM in the digital domain would put quantization error in the frequency domain, i.e. notes would be off-pitch instead of having noise.

Comparing difficulty between FM and SID is a bit apples to oranges. The SID has analog variance in its filter, and no two are exactly the same, so a pure DSP implementation has to do rather heavy math to approximate the filter. As a result most people lean on a handful of SID emulation cores because otherwise their emulation is just wrong.

OTOH the things that tend to differentiate implementations of Yamaha's FM are the sample rates, bit depths, and envelopes used, plus any output distortion(YM2612 for example has a well known distortion in its implementation that adds a harsher edge). The core algorithms they use are something a high school student could pick up and do something with, and emulation quality issues are more a matter of it being easy to write an emulation that gets it 98% correct without covering the last steps, since those are details that really need error-for-error reproduction of the original ASICs and boards, including any timing issues - things which frustrate emulator writers everywhere.

Phase modulation synthesis as Yamaha does it is computationally very cheap. That was one of the things that really boosted its fortunes in the 80s: you could produce very complex timbres (albeit often nasal or harsh sounding) with just a few sine waves pushing each other around. It's literally just a sine wave whose output pushes the phase of the next sine wave (operator in Yamaha's parlance) forward. You don't even need floating point math, and Yamaha got by with 12-bit DACs.

The SY99/77 really are great, though. I sold my TG77 and FS1R recently, but will probably get myself a used SY99 keyboard at some point. Or save up for a Montage.

Stage keyboards aren't really supposed to be innovative. If you try and compete with Mainstage, you end up with a PC in a weird form factor. Stage keyboards are built to be rugged, reliable and intuitive instruments for performing musicians. These users overwhelmingly don't want frequent software updates and innovative new features, they want a tool that does the job with a minimum of hassle.

There's a reason why so many keyboard players adore their Nord keyboard, despite it having relatively old-fashioned technology. Nord instruments are incredibly ergonomic and sound absolutely killer, largely because of their obsessive attention to detail and their deep relationships with working musicians. A trivial example is the music stand - it's rock solid, it fits in the gig bag, it slots in place in two seconds and it's wide enough to hold four pages. It's a really important feature for a lot of Nord users, but it just wouldn't occur to most engineers.

Pressed steel, Neutrik jacks and keybeds aren't subject to Moore's Law. High-end stage keyboards will always be expensive, because they're built to high standards in relatively small quantities. The lack of innovation just isn't particularly relevant, because old technology does the job perfectly well.

Yeah but then we also fall in the "and we throw the old one away" category. Sure, if we find the perfect one, we'll be sticking with it for a while, but if the new thing is actually better: stage pianos are tools, they're not precious instruments lovingly hand crafted by instrument makers. I will happily throw a Roland RD800 out the window if you give me an RD2000 instead. Same for a Nord Stage3 vs an old Nord Stage. Maybe if they were vintage, as pointed out somewhere else, but they're just not. There isn't a single modern stage piano that isn't just an excellent sampler with ideally a rock solid hardware UI. Zero reason to care about replacing those if the new model has better samples, or better hardware UI, or both.

The original Nord Stage is still an excellent instrument and commands high prices on the used market. There's no reason to throw the old one away and few reasons to buy the new one, because the old one does pretty much everything you need it to do.

We're talking about very mature technology. The difference between Nord's 100MB piano sample sets and a 20GB mega-multisample is extremely subtle. The synth and effects engine on the Nord Stage sounds fantastic. You could add a ton of sample memory and processing power, but the sonic benefits would be absolutely marginal.

None of those devices are being thrown away and many of them will be re-surfaced and cycled as 'classics' within a few years and used in mainstream music again.

You can't say that about our computers or mobile phones, except among the hoarding/collectors scene.

I have to agree. 14 years ago Korg released the OASYS which was meant to be open and expandable. They then released the Kronos which, while based largely on the same technology, is a step backwards for open development and expansion.

What innovation do we need ? technology is probably way above what's needed, the real requirement is on labels and bands.

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