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Comment by EarlKing | Hacker News Reader

It's really starting to scare me how many of my personal interests manage to crop up as articles here.

We're not as unique as we like to believe. I bet there are probably just ~400 different archetypal people that read HN.

Yeah, I’m willing to bet that most folks here are either into music/audio, photography, video production, or building gear and software that supports these endeavors in some way. I know a lot of people who code, but few of them visit this site. The ones that do fall into one of those categories.

I think I've observed a strong correlation between programmers with hobbies in the real world that involve making things. Carpentry is a biggie. So is photography and cooking. Also musical performance (guitar/drums/bass) but to a lesser extent.

Hmm.. seems like hobbies that involve lots (and lots) of gear are key. :)

Your circle of friends who code is either small or young. This site was foundationally mostly coders for a very very long time. Often times technical articles and codebases would pop up and large discussions had. Sad to see that's the upcoming perception.

Well, yes, but it can get eerie when I suddenly start seeing articles aimed at a very specific machine I happen to have recently begun playing^H^H^Hworking with (i.e. the DX7).

Hmmmm....

I REALLY LOVE THE ROLAND D-50. GOSH, IT SURE WOULD BE NICE IF THERE WAS AN OPEN SOURCE EMULATOR FOR IT...

...and now we wait.

> I REALLY LOVE THE ROLAND D-50.

Hahahaha!

I did my best work on an SY77 ... /waits/ ... and an Ensoniq EPS ... /crickets/

To this day I don't think anyone (outside of Roland) really knows how the 'LA synthesis' in the D-50 actually works. Unlike Yamaha's work on FM synthesis, Roland didn't file any patents for their LA synthesis technique.

A really interesting fact I found out when I did my own research on the DX7's development was that Roland’s technical R&D director Tadao Kikumoto spent over a year researching Yamaha's FM patents to try and find a way to implement FM without infringement, and even longer trying to find prior art to invalidate the patents themselves. In the end, it was apparently this research that eventually led to the D-50.

Actually, over the years, a fair bit of information has been published over exactly how LA synthesis works. They never exactly hid the details. The problem, of course, is that the details are scattered over dozens of magazine articles, and interspersed with half-truths repeated by well-meaning (but simply wrong) gearheads.

If you're really masochistic there's also the D-50 plugin that Roland published not too long ago. One could always disassemble and/or instrument that to ascertain the exact details... not that it would be entirely necessary since at least one company did, by all accounts, come up with a passable replica of the D-50 as a VST, but immediately got hit by Roland's lawyers because they made the mistake of using the attack samples from the D-50's dumped ROMs.

TL;DR Someone will do it eventually.

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