Interesting! I share a keen interest in synthesizers.
If you play these patches on the DX7 itself, how good is the reproducibility? I would assume the digital settings to match perfectly. Is there anything else going on that might make patches feel different on different DX7s?
For example, I could imagine some oscillators having subtle differences, perhaps with variation with temperature? If the signal path is all downstream of the same clock, at least until the final analog conversion, I’d expect negligible variation.
As far as I know the engineering standards within Yamaha are excellent
and consistent. From what I've heard DX9 patches sound perfect from
DX7 but without velocity, and TX7, TX816 and other modules sound
identical. Also DX7 patches import perfectly into later Yamaha FM
products.
About variance; I'm talking about the design of emulators. There's
quite a lot of VSTs and other plugins (that all sound amazing) but the
same patch doesn't necessarily sound identical on each. Two classic
voices to test from the original ROM presets are Tuberise and
GrandPNO2.
BTW these are digital oscillators so temperatures and component
tolerances are not a factor.
If you play these patches on the DX7 itself, how good is the reproducibility? I would assume the digital settings to match perfectly. Is there anything else going on that might make patches feel different on different DX7s?
For example, I could imagine some oscillators having subtle differences, perhaps with variation with temperature? If the signal path is all downstream of the same clock, at least until the final analog conversion, I’d expect negligible variation.