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Comment by tgv | Hacker News Reader

Plogue, a Canadian software company, have recently released a (software) emulation of the DX-7 in excruciating detail. Here you can see part of the trouble they went through: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJ97iXQrqzw. Suffice to say that they used a logic analyzer to discover gritty details that no other analysis of the DX-7 I know has ever paid attention of.

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Another venerable DX7 software emulation worth mentioning is the free and open source Dexed[0], which also doubles as a patch librarian for a real DX7.

[0] https://asb2m10.github.io/dexed/

dexed is in the Acknowledgements of the main article

Wow, thank you

I like to think I’m a synth nerd in the know, and certainly chat a lot and read synth forums. But Plogue have flown under my radar. This looks like great stuff at a good price. Do you own any of their soft synths?

They have some great things. I bought their Bitcrusher plugin years ago, which is really fun, and I think I still receive software updates for that.

Chipsounds is great if you're into 8-bit / chiptunes and the like (they also have a "chipsynths" series of plugins emulating SNES/MEGADRIVE, and other classic game consoles, but I haven't tested them...)

And Bidule is quite a thing. Is some sort of modular VST synth with tremendous options for routing that seems very well suited to prepare live performances. The Philip Glass Ensemble, through Michael Resman has used it at least once to make complex live setups: https://www.plogue.com/michael-riesman.html

Plogue has been around for a while but nobody could fault you for missing them. I have been and active member of KVR VST for over 20 years which is where I heard of them but never owned anything of theirs. It was only recently announced that they released this 'sample accurate' DX7 clone.

I have TX7 for and the Arturia DX-7V. Typically FM or Phase Distortion(Casio CZ synths) arent really the type of sound I go for, but they definitely shine in clanky metallic dissonance.

Bidule has been around for ages - at least 10 and maybe even 20 years.

I have two of their sample players (one for Garritan products, and their free sfz player), I've got Bidule (which is a semi-modular environment where you can combine processing units and plugins in complex graphs; a bit like Reaktor), and recently bought the OPS7, because it sounds so damn authentic and is fun to play with: it has two layers, so you get something similar to the DX-1/5 sound.

they're super great, their software is ace. we used to work with them at my old company and they're lovely people too!

I think they have a decently lengthen demo period for all their plugins. I remember playing with many of them in the past for a period

Thank you, most interesting.

Mind blown

Why?

The DAC conversion is hard to nail in combined with the 12-bit certain crunchiness to the old Yamaha FM synths.

Retro synth emulators are terrible at proper analog audio emulation. Higan (the "most accurate" SNES emulator) uses cubic teaming for the output without an attempt to emulate the stairstepped ZOH DAC or analog lowpass, or implement a brick wall. Plogue is one of the few developers to produce proper analog emulation, and they say they document all their research (https://youtu.be/V3yWXVAZgO0), but I'll have to check again to see if I can find it in the video or not.

I think using 15-bit ADPCM u-law would be a quick and dirty approximation. Or similar ADPCM.

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