Dave Smith - Poly Evolver Keys (Kinda cool (turnkey suck) had one & it broke !)

[Artesia]

...Wimper ..Drools uncontrollably, and fleeces his pockets for change ;) :)

Excellent on everything except polyphony, and you'd probably not need that..

http://www.davesmithinstruments.com/polyevolver/design.html

Some blarb & specs from the website, edited down.. if you are all that interested.. please see his site for more..

Poly Evolver: Specifications

The Poly Evolver Keyboard has a 5 octave keyboard, 77 endless-turn knobs, and 59 switches. The keyboard is weighted 5 octaves, with velocity and mono aftertouch (pressure). It measures 38.5" wide, 14" deep, and 4" high, and weighs 23 pounds.

The Poly Evolver Rack is a 1U 19" rack, and is fully programmable from the front panel. It also comes with a free Mac/PC editor. It measures 19" wide, 9" deep, and 1.75" high, and weighs 6 pounds.

Operation Manual/MIDI Spec

Specifications; Keyboard and Rack

last Updated May 2005

4 Banks of 128 Programs for 512 total Programs; 3 banks of 128 Combos (384)- dump to/from MIDI

The internal controllers and DSP chips can be reprogrammed via MIDI, for easy feature additions

The following specs are for one of the four voices, so multiply everything times 4:

.Four oscillators in total: two analog, two digital

Analog Oscillator waveshape are Sawtooth, Triangle, Saw-Triangle, and Pulse (with voltage-controlled analog Pulse-Width modulation)

Digital Oscillators select from 96 wavetables from the Prophet-VS (128 words x 12 bits), and 32 user-loadable (via MIDI) Wavetables (128 words x 16 bits). The Digital Oscillators get trashy as the frequency gets higher, as with the original VS.

Hard Sync on the analog oscillators

FM and Ring Mod on the digital oscillators

Separate Glide per oscillator, with two glide modes

Real voltage-controlled Curtis analog lowpass filters - not digital recreations. 4-pole/2-pole switchable, fully resonant (in 4-pole mode). There are two separate filters, one for the left channel and one for the right for a true stereo signal path.

Analog Voltage Controlled Amplifiers (VCA), again one for each channel.

Dual digital 4-pole Highpass filters (one per channel); place before or after analog electronics.

Stereo audio inputs; Noise generator

Envelope Follower and Peak Detect from External Input to use as modulation sources

External Input can be used to gate envelopes and/or step the Sequencer

Three fast ADSR envelopes

Four LFOs (sync with sequencer and MIDI)

Dual (left and right channel) tunable feedback loops; modulate frequency and amount

Delay with 3 taps; each with separate time and amount modulation. Syncs to sequencer/MIDI. Normal feedback and additional feedback path through analog filters

Distortion... Digital, one for each channel, can be placed before or after analog electronics

16 x 4 Analog-style sequencer - syncs with MIDI

Extensive Modulation capabilities, including audio-range modulation. Bipolar (+/-) modulation.

[stryd_one]

What's with the advert dude?

[Artesia]

Hi Stryd,

Yes well, casualty of spontainious enthusiasm, i guess it could be seen that way...

i just cut n pasted what was on the website, ill edit it down to the facts, if admin objects... they are welcome to delete the post... i dont mind :)

All its about, is of all the new commercial synths i've seen float by lately (well analogish ones anyways...) ...this is the only one which really caught my interest as being pretty fun & well rounded ..allbeit its a bloody expensive beast for the somewhat pretty keyboard version; however its heap loads more value / sound diversity for your money than a moog voyager ...which is still very nice btw.

and no, i have no connection to Dave Smith, wish i did tho... as i might get a discount ;)

[AndrewMartens]

Come on, you can MIDIbox one of those yourself!  It's just a dual-oscillator wavetable synth, throw in a few CEMs, a digital delay/FX unit, a few filters, an arpeggiator, a sequencer... and you're done!  Oh, well, a nice case, too.

Shouldn't cost more than a thousand dollars and a year of your life to build... ;)

At least, that's what I told myself when I was in the store looking at a DSI Evolver.  ;D

[Artesia]

well.. although it might be possible to build something which has its general structure, i doubt its particular character could be obtained, it uses a bunch of custom chips engineered around the design of the old prophet's curtis filter chips ..amongst other things ;)

Also i would love to see wave table synthsis cloned on a diy basis ..it would be so much fun to dabble on with. There is a user built project on the web.. who built his own wavetable synth.. however it was designed as a complete synth.. rather than just a voice module ...so it'd take some picking appart to remake it the way you wanted to.

Yeah, its quite expensive.. then again its way less than the moog & has moe to show for its circuits ;) Sure has features in common with many other keyboards... however theres much about it thats different enough to well and truely avoid it being just another 'me too' product.

it would however be pretty easy to clone a moog ...they are well understood electrically, and all of the components are available off the shelf ..for way less money (5-20%) than a brand spanking new voyager v3 ;)

also, id love to see the person who makes a decent weighted, velocity sensitive keyboard from scratch ;) ...thats an awful lot of work making all those keys alone ..let alone the mechanics to mount em' up...

Guess you could buy raw keyboard units, but thats cheating right ? ;)

[stryd_one]

http://www.avrx.se/

Looking forward to that one....

[Artesia]

yes, it does look like alot of fun ;) ..ill be making one of those too :)

[Artesia]

some news... three pocket burning incidents happened at once.. one i got a serious bout of synth lust, followed by seeing one of the boards on B-stock for silly cheap money & then also got paid off for some odds and sods i'd been owed for a while ...result being i couldnt resist in putting down irrisponsible money on a synth.

I did indeed, as crazy as it was.. own a DSI Poly Evolver for about a week... before the one i had, freakily broke down (so much for me harking on about modern kit being reliable !). Something to do with the communication between the cpu control and some of the dac circuitary went completely off on one ...followed by a total crash.

before that happened, i have to say it sounded great, in its own uniquely trashy, warm analog way... pretty much a new prophet alright. Also the build quality was excellent ..heavy metalwork & decent construction throughout ..had the look of been made on a small scale in a low level production run (in t' usa).

Another thing as well, overlooked the fact that the wavetable functionality is minimal; basically it is used as a way to program a single 'wave cycle' such that you are not just limited to the standard waveshapes offered by the analog oscillators. The only way to create changing wavetables is to use a modulation source (lfo, sequencer, etc) to scan through the stored waves (64 rom (?) and 32 user) ...with no iterpolation morphing between waves ..like on the waldorfs.

So on the wavetable account; i retract my statement ..the waldorfs ..particularly the Q+ could leave it for dust, on using this route to create advanced shifting textures.

And if i ever see a q+ going somewhere for a reasonable price; i'm going to have to pray that i can find the money ;) ...tho the all digital XT will do me for now :)

following this malfunction, i found myself re-evaluating the situation & decided aside of its very fat, trashy sound ... it would have to be exchanged for something else which offered a greater justifycation for the expenditure.. I'm going to wait until the Poly Rack comes down to a reasonable price, as although its nice to have as a keyboard.. its contents dont justify the space it takes up (The whole gubbins will fit in a 1u rack!) ...and what it costs.

Am replacing it with an alesis andromeda, as i wanted one of those for quite some time, and forgot all about them.. as when they came out ..they were insanely expensive.. Has 16 voices, a graphical programming interface & seems capable of a pretty huge scope of analog sounds ..and closely emulating many classics that would be too unreliable (cough!) ..and expensive to own :)

Oh and on the note of virtual analogs, not a huge fan of them.. i was lent a Clavia Nord Lead 3 to check out (supposedly one of the best virtual analogs about) whilst the shop got an alesis in..

And although its an solidly built & has a damn good user interface..

The sound doesnt quite compare to the real analogs its attempting to immitate.. It has all the zing and texture of the sounds, but something doesnt sound right ...when you listen beyond the surface; you ralise that theres this huge depth of sound missing & it particularly lacks something about the bass qualitys.

The sound just hangs there like a phantom ..rather than knocks you off your feet like a boxer :)

Actually did a comparison between the clavia & a oberheim matrix 1000 ...duplicating the sound settings. The matrix beat it hands down.. as far as my ears where concerned. ...and given that the matrix is far cheaper (£120-£300) & probably as reliable... it would be silly to spend 6-10x the price on a "well its not analog, but it sorta sounds like that".

So yeah.. when buying/building anything for analog sounds ...check out the real mccoy analogs first :)

Oh also, i now Hate Turnkey with a passion usually reserved for fascists... Got absolutely appauling customer service when dealing with them... For one, no one could tell me when it was due to arrrive (and 10 days later it did) ...nor if it had actually been packed. And dispite the fact that it arrived in immaculate condition, the ejit who packed it, neglected to put the power pack in & only included the '8 style' mains power lead..

That was a very frustrating evening.

Oh also went down to london (was going anyways) ...and went to pick up the power pack in person. Now after standing around for (what felt like) 15 mins in a not very busy shop; the sales attendant who was all of 3 feet from me (and had just finished dealing with another customer) turned his back on me and started some casual conversation with one of the phone attendants on the desk immediately behind him ..and everyone, busy or otherwise ignored/dodged requests for some service (hmm surely im not that scarey !).

When he did talk, the first thing he tried to tell me (without listening to what i had to say); was that i was in the wrong shop.. as i had just at that second produced a sound control receipt. And it took some effort to get him to listen to the point that they had bought the kbd through turnkey on my behalf (they are all under the same parent company now) ..and that i was in the store to collect the missing power supply.

Now although the manager at my store had spoke explicitly to staff there to ensure they knew about the missing psu & that theyd have it ready; no one knew.. nor where they keen to run and get one.

In the end i got my psu, although hardly customer service with a smile...

Cheers turnkey, you are such a 'lovely' bunch !

...Needless to say, i wont be going out of my way to give turnkey, my custom and deal with them again anytime soon ...talk about ungreatful sods.

oh btw Check out my latests post: i took appart and photographed the contents of both the Poly Evolver & the Clavia Nord Lead out of my own curiousity & figured people here would be interested in what goes into these expensive boxes these days :)

Alesis andromeda up next..