Quote:
Originally posted by keybplayer:
With ALL thes new CPU and Polyphony intensive features being added to workstations and even more polyphony intensive arrangers, 128 notes of polyphony CAN NOT cut the mustard in my opinion. But it always seems to fall on deaf ears except in a RARE few occasions like Ketron's forthcoming Audya and Korg's now obsolete Oasys, etc. If Ensnareyou is right about the SHARC chips or an FPGA then I still think theoretically polyphony need not be solely based and hardwired to hardware as far as increasing the amount goes. But on the other hand I could indeed be wrong about that assumption.



Mike,

Companies like Wersi, Lionstracs, and Open Labs offer instruments where polyphony is so high you won't even think twice about it. Is 1024+ voice polyphony enough for you? How about the polyphony only being limited by CPU speed and RAM? That's one of the strong points of open architecture instruments.

The reason the big three don't offer more polyphony is that they are limited by the CPU and its processing power. To increase polyphony they'd need a better CPU, more RAM, and that would significantly change the price point of the instrument. There's a reason the Audya, Lionstracs Mediastation, and Wersi OAS instruments cost more, they use higher end components that cost significantly more.

The Korg Oasys is a great example of an open ended instrument where the manufacturer didn't offer the kind of support for it that they should have. The Oasys has the processing power and RAM capability to be far more than it is but rather than allowing third parties access to Korg software so they could integrate third party VST's and other applications into the Oasys, Korg chose to keep the system closed. Korg had a great idea with the Oasys but I believe the sales weren't as expected and as such Korg decided to not develop much more software for the instrument. I was one of the people who purchased an Oasys and had high hopes for it. I saw the writing on the wall early on when software updates lacked the much needed features and instead Korg decided to offer sound sets rather than features so I sold my Oasys. It was a phenomenal synthesizer but by no means the Pro Workstation Korg touted it to be.