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The recently released hydra synth has 8 voices. While the Roland Jupiter xm has (up to?) 256 note polyphony. Yet they are pretty similar in price. Does anyone know why there is such a disparity in the voice counts on these? Is it FPGA vs DSP that is accounting for this difference?
The DX7 fm based synth engine came out in '83 and had 16 voice polyphony. The analog modeling Nord lead 2 came out in '97 with 20 voices. The '98 notation supernova had 20+ voices and a complete effects section. My reface dx was ~$250 and has 8 voice polyphony and two effects slots. Its strange how this has evolved over time as it seems like all digital synths should have seemingly unlimited polyphony when comparing to what we had 20 years ago. Are the filter/distortion/effects emulations becoming more CPU hungry? Are sample rates of oscillators going way up to stop fm/am aliasing?
Also wondering how many voices you want on a polysynth? When I play polyphonically with less than 6 voices it is extremely frustrating but at 16 voices I never notice voice stealing.
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