PAULA MIDI SYNTH BOX Like SID BOX?

[commodorejohn]

They have. It's called an "Amiga."

[commodorejohn]

Oh pshaw. The SID will blow any generic-ass wavetable GM box completely out of the water for sheer sonic character. Hell, even Yamaha's old FM chips would outshine the generic XG crap they poop out now, if used well. And hey, Paula as well has its own particular character (thanks to the gritty early digital sound tamed by a bit of filtering,) even if it is just a sample-playback affair.

But it's silly to think that it'd be worth the trouble trying to create a dedicated module version; for one thing, as freqmax points out, Paula itself is only DACs and filters, and requires Agnus to actually get its data. For another, you need a system to load samples into memory, interpret incoming MIDI events, assign channels, and apply effects like volume envelopes anyway. At that point, you're already halfway to an Amiga.

[commodorejohn]

I keep reading that, but I sure don't hear it when I playback CD audio in 14bit at 44Khertz. The only thing I hear is some noise in very soft parts of the music.

I'd count that as a bit different, though, since the 14-bit trick is circumventing one of the chief aspects (the 8-bit sample depth) that adds that grit in the first place, and software mixing is going to resample everything to the master sample rate, possibly with interpolation, as opposed to the varying rates and lack of interpolation used when playing back samples on individual channels. (Also, if it's on an ECS/AGA machine, it's maybe running at a higher maximum sample rate, which would affect it as well.) All told, you're working around a number of things that non-AHI audio does to the signal.

It's also possible that my perception of the "Amiga sound" is affected by the speaker characteristics of the 1084, but I recall it being pretty noticeable over external speakers as well...

MT32 is still the best

The MT-32's pretty great alright Even if I have been a bit spoiled for lesser Roland LA synths by getting to play a D-50...

[commodorejohn]

If it ain't better than a FPGA + D/A then it's not worthwhile. Said combination can also do filters in the digital domain. And at that point the Amiga custom chip loose.

Depends. Filters are tricky beasts that impose their own particular character on a sound, and they're rarely identical just for having the same basic specs. The 12db/oct. low-pass filters in my Matrix-6, my JX-10, and my MS-20 Mini don't sound at all the same, even when you don't have the resonance cranked up. Nothing in all the world but a Moog filter sounds like a Moog filter (except for the various naked clones of the Moog filter that were kiboshed for patent infringement!) It's probably possible to come up with a good emulation of the Amiga's filter, but it's not as simple as just "oh, digital filter, 12db, done."

Sure, but all 8bit samples, regardless of hardware, will sound like that.

Yes, but again, it's only one part of the equation.

Well, I'm not using AHI (don't have it installed), and play CD  audio back with Hippo player. The only non-standard thing here is the  playback rate of 44Khz (using a 31Khz screen mode). It's still Paula  playing a few samples with DMA however (and Paula can go much faster  than DMA), so I'm still not convinced

Well, you're still circumventing the 8-bit aspect, and you're also doing  playback at 44KHz instead of x-28KHz, both of which bring the  sound much closer in line with modern specs. Of course that's  gonna sound different than a game playing back 8-bit samples at varying,  sub-28KHz rates.

Understand, I'm not saying that the Amiga can only do  oldschool-type sounds - I'm just saying that what we may generally think  of as the "Amiga sound" has a lot to do with the way it was originally  designed to be used, whatever clever workarounds we've come up with  since then.

Perhaps it has something to do with it. My Amiga is connected to  an amp with reasonable headphones, and when I listen to CD audio, I just  hear sound that sounds almost the same as what my peecee produces. Back  in the day they used to say the Amiga has CD quality sound. Turns out  to be almost true.

Anyway, you've gotta use an amp with proper speakers or phones for your  Amiga. Those internal monitor speakers do the thing justice

Oh, I have run mine through proper speakers, and it's plenty nice. I  just find that, for classic games and vintage MOD playback at least, I  kinda like the things that are done to the sound by the 1084. It sounds  right, to me.

[commodorejohn]

Yes, but there are little idiosyncracies (variable-rate samples going to independent DACs, which are non-linear, run through an analog filter) that are going to color the sound in a distinctive way. If you want the Amiga sound, the simplest way is just going to be to use an Amiga.

[commodorejohn]

Actually, its the FM series I am thinking about building into a 63C09E design I am bread boarding.

Ah. Good choice. (I've actually got a spare OPL3 combo chip I'd like to build a portable sequencer around one day...)

And as to character, yeah SID sound is identifiable.
I don't know that that makes it more desirable.
And Midi compatibility (which the SID doesn't have) is nothing to scoff about.

Well, the SID may not be to your taste, but it certainly is to a lot of people's. It's the closest home computers ever got to a classic subtractive analog synthesizer, even if it's very limited by comparison to those. And it's perfectly possible to add MIDI capability to a C64, or use one of the various SID-based module designs.

(If you mean General MIDI compatibility...feh. No, you're not easily going to get 16 voices of SID sound, but who cares? A lot of classic synthesizers only have one voice. Use it as a lead or a bass or something and employ something else - a Yamaha FM chip, say - for your chords, if you really need a big huge arrangement - interoperability between disparate devices with different strengths in a single setup is the whole point of MIDI to begin with.)

BTW - I can tell you DO know what you are talking about, because I would go with an FM over an XG design myself. 2 to 4 meg wavetable in rom or ram?
Yeah, sometimes the older hardware just had more capability.
Unfortunately, as processor have become more powerful, sound chips have kind off de-evolved.
The AC'97 spec is a joke.

Oy, tell me about it. It's shocking how the best stuff currently on the market is the stuff that either dedicatedly emulates or simply goes back entirely to the technology of the '70s and '80s. I got my Korg MS-20 Mini (a direct recreation of an old analog monosynth) the week before last and I've spent damn near every free moment since playing with it (even while in the middle of a move!) But I tried the whiz-bang Jupiter-80 (an "advanced" modern digital wavetable/modelling keyboard gussied up like the classic JP8, which it doesn't sound a thing like) at my local music store and got bored of it after three minutes. Somehow things went terribly, terribly wrong when ROMplers became the dominant species of synthesizer...

Didn't Musicline Editor do actual realtime synthesis using Paula?

http://www.musicline.org/software.html

If that featurelist is accurate, yes. For a 68k-based softsynth, that's  impressive - resonant filters and effects? Hell, a lot of hardware  ROMplers didn't even have that.

[commodorejohn]

What's so bad about the AC97 spec?

It's provided a mediocre standard for computer audio to uniformly adhere to and never bother with striving to improve on or add interesting new facets to. (At least until you get into overpriced pro-audio gear.)

and what makes OPL3 so good?

It's a versatile synthesizer chip capable of a wide variety of rich, interesting sounds, and has the distinctive Yamaha FM character. You'd never mistake it for anything else.

What's wrong with ROMplers?

Nothing's inherently wrong with ROMplers, but by the mid-'90s they had, kudzu-like, almost completely overtaken the landscape, from the bottom-end cheap Casio crap to high-end digital pianos and "workstation" keyboards. This is a problem because ROMplers are just plain not in the slightest bit organic; you press a note at a given velocity with a given patch, you get the same damn sound every time. Whereas even the DX7, while just as purely digital, lets you add subtle touches (like the capability for any of the six oscillators to be free-running) that differentiate each note from the next in an analog kind of way. ROMplers have their uses, but as the be-all and end-all of sound synthesis that they've become, it's Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Baked Beans, Spam, Spam, Spam and Spam. Just way the hell too much Spam.

Btw, I feel that it weren't until the 90's that artists learnt to make good use of synthezisers.

Allow me to prove you completely, utterly wrong.

[commodorejohn]

The music industry at large has never known its ass from its elbow, man. When Chuck Berry was ripping it up on the crazy new distorted guitar and Little Richard was shrieking like a maniac, the music industry was employing Pat Boone to make that music safe for easily-frightened old white grannies. Nowadays the music industry thinks that you can make a singer by grabbing some skank off the street and running her through auto-tune. "The music industry at large" is the last place you look for actual talent in music.

A sufficient computer audio standard shouldn't be a standard at all, basically. There should be some basic standard capabilities, but manufacturers should be encouraged to color the results in interesting ways, with interesting (optional) effects, and we should bring back MIDI as a default method for music delivery. Back in the day, when each sound card had its own way of rendering MIDI, you could actually get different sounds out of them. If you didn't like the sound of an OPL2 sound card, you could get a GUS, or an IBM Music Feature Card, or hook up to an MT-32 through an external MIDI connection. Each of those would sound very different, and you could pick one that you liked. Now it's all the exact same stuff in MP3 recordings, and where there is MIDI, it's that same wretched Roland soundfont that comes with Windows. Yuck.

[commodorejohn]

Lets put it this way, any music you could access by listening to radio or buying records. There were even special shops for those weird "imported records" for people that wasn't satisfied with the industry marketed and spoon fed stuff. It took until the 90s before they presented synthesizer music that was good.

Dude, every single one of those except the Doctor Who theme was off a record that was either on a major label (Relayer and Selling England by the Pound, both by bands that were very popular at the time,) otherwise a significant hit (Oxygène sold 15 million copies and hit #2 in the UK charts, Équinoxe hit #11,) or both (friggin' The Dark Side of the Moon is only the second best-selling album of all time.) These were not obscure little indie records or something.

[commodorejohn]

I'll admit that, being as I was still close to a decade out from being born in 1976, I can't say firsthand, but...seriously? Oxygène was a smash hit. People who aren't even into electronic music (i.e. my dad) knew about it.

[commodorejohn]

Cubase 64

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDrqBYkco-Y

Amazing

[commodorejohn]

Cool thread guys, I saw reference to Yamaha stuff so wanted to tell you guys I have one of these boxes "The Amiga Project XG"

Eh. Unfortunately, by the time Yamaha developed their XG standard, they'd gone entirely into ROMpler territory, playing the same sets of samples from ROM (downsampled to lower rates on the cheaper instruments) on basically everything, sacrificing pretty much any potential for sound creation in the name of "realism." Bleah. Their FM synths (or even their ROMpler/FM hybrid synths like the SY77) were much more interesting.

Amiga can do pretty nice sounding SID renditions  (Per Hakan Sundell's C64 Demo for Amiga OCS and his SIDPlay app sound  excellent...he also wrote C64S DOS emulator).

The renditions I've heard on the Amiga are nice in the sense that  they sound good, but they're only kind of reminiscent of the SID, and  nothing you'd ever mistake for the real deal. Then again, I haven't kept  up on the Amiga side of SID emulation for a while...

The problem with having a traditional soundchip is they have a distinct sound.

Whether that's a problem or not largely depends on what you want out of  an audio device. If you want flawless reproduction of a pre-defined  sound, then yeah, you're not going to want a synthesizer chip - what  you'd want is the highest-quality DAC/aliasing filter combo you can get  and enough memory to store a good recording of the sound. But for those  of us who want an instrument, that's a silly complaint to make.  You wouldn't gripe if you bought an acoustic piano and found that it was  incapable of sounding like a Hammond organ; that would be silly. The AY  chips didn't suck because they had a distinct character, they sucked  because they were capable of exactly two kinds of sound (square waves  and noise,) and there's just only so much you can do with that.  Whereas the SID is much more capable, but still distinctive and full of  character.

Having said that SID is a genuine analogue synth on a chip and  that is the key to why it is such an awesome piece of kit to design  things for. If you look how much 1980 mono synths with similar  technology cost you will not call a $20 6581 chip over priced ever again  IMO

Well, I wouldn't stack the SID up against higher-priced monosynths - it  doesn't get quite the full organic, analog feel because its oscillators  are digital, the ring mod and oscillator sync are rather lackluster, and  the filter resonance doesn't even get close to self-oscillation.  (Though it has its own advantages - there's surprisingly few synths that  can do PWM with a center point other than pure square, or provide anything like  the noise + pulse combo waveform. It'd certainly be a lot closer contest  against single-oscillator budget monosynths like the SH-101, where it  could compete on sound and deliver polyphony.) But yeah, it is  pretty dang incredible how much Bob Yannes delivered in one little chip  for a low-cost home computer

Biggest problem with SIDs IMO are that no two even from the same  revision sound exactly the same ie two 6581 revision 3 chips may sound  different even in the same machine...a subtle difference but with games  that use complex filtering effects it can be noticeably  different.

Au contraire, that's part of the beauty of analog gear

Not the same sound, BETTER sound using any old  Win XP laptop costing $50 and a copy XMPlay. The only unusual thing  about my setup is it's sitting in my home cinema and the music is sent  digitally to the amp so it is the purest possible sound of what the MOD  is supposed to sound like before the cheap ass components on the A500  motherboard destroy the quality even more.

All depends on what you define as "better." A lot of us like that sound, however much it might make audio snobs shudder.

That means there's more than plain D/A and  standard analog filter. So could anyone describe what's special in  technical terms?

"More than" a DAC and filter, no. But again, even a system with just a DAC and filter can have its own distinct character, because those components color the sound in their own ways. No electronic component, especially no analogue electronic component, is actually a mathematically ideal implementation of its nominal function. As has been noted, the Amiga's DACs aren't even close to linear - that's going to distort the output. Also, samples are fed in at varying rates and played back without interpolation, which means that any aliasing noise is going to come out at a different frequency, likely well within the range of human hearing, which is also going to color the sound.

And finally, there is not a single analog filter in existence that has a mathematically ideal, linear frequency roll-off. (Which virtually every emulator in existence gets wrong; even reSID was wrongly doing linear roll-off until very recently.) Even the cleaner filters have a curved roll-off, and a lot of them will have different ranges roll off at different curves. Additionally, real-world filters don't just attenuate frequency components, they change their phase relationships. All of this varies wildly from filter to filter, with the result that just about every design is at least subtly different. (A good place to go for further reading on this subject would be installments 4 and 5 of Gordon Reid's excellent Synth Secrets series for Sound on Sound. The man knows his stuff.)

So, really, even with a very simple DAC + filter system, there's any number of factors that can give a distinct character to the sound. It's probably not impossible to emulate them properly, but I don't know of an emulator that does. Many get things basically right, but I'm not surprised that folks like magnetic feel that only the real deal provides the same sound. It's complex.

[commodorejohn]

Or use the real thing ;P

[commodorejohn]

I like the Z80 for having an astonishingly large register complement for an 8-bitter, but it just chews up so many cycles per instruction...

Wish the 8086 had evolved from it instead of the 8080, that's for sure.

[commodorejohn]

Again, just to nitpick, this is not entirely true, as there are XG implementations based on OPL3 (look at YMF719). XG is no more of a particular sound than General MIDI is, and implementations vary, although I recognize that most were boring romplers.

Not really. The YMF719 is a sound-card-in-a-chip combo deal; it only includes the OPL3 for legacy purposes. For its "XG" implementation it's actually got wavetable synthesis capabilities (though I don't know that every YMF719-based sound card used them, since it required external sample memory, and that would've cost money.) By the time the XG standard came around, all of Yamaha's synthesizers were "AWM" (their name for PCM.)

XG isn't an exact particular sound set, yes, but in practice it's even more narrowly confined to certain sounds than GM, which at least sees variation from manufacturer to manufacturer. About the only variation in XG instruments is in overall sound quality (rather than significant differences in actual sound design,) plus a few sounds unique to particular models that they throw in for variety.

(And frankly, GM was really the start of the problem to begin with - while I understand the motives behind it, it turned out to be a disastrous move from MIDI-as-instrument-control to MIDI-as-sound-reproduction, which was never what it was intended to be in the first place.)