Hacker News Reader

Comment by alfiedotwtf | Hacker News Reader

> Incidentally, a boutique synth that replicates the CS-80 pretty well (without keyboard) is the Deckard's Dream. It's $4000 but that's way less than a vintage CS-80.

If you hear from two CS-80 owners (Ty Unwin and Dave Spiers) talking about the CS-80 (back a few years ago when a Yamaha R&D engineer asked a forum what they would want to see in a CS-80 remake, which started a new round on the rumormill) on Sonic Talk, the Deckard Dream sounds nice but it ain't a CS-80 - the thing that was special with the CS-80 was the UI rather than the sound itself.

View on HN

There's a degree of UI design overlap between the CS-80 and Yamaha's electronic organs of the same period, and it's interesting to think about how this pays off for the CS-80.

One of the defining characteristics of an organ is that the sound of the note tends not to change over time and the keys are essentially just on/off switches. Hence, any kind of articulation you want to get into the sound has to be done by working the controls while you're playing.

You then take a synth which is vastly more receptive to having its sound reshaped in real time, and design a UI for it that encourages this, you get a synth that we're still talking about (and struggling to replicate) 45 years later.

What are the important UI differences? The DD replicates a lot of the UI, even to the point of having some of the bottom sliders work backwards, just like the CS-80 did.

I can't say because I've never played one, but if you watch it, you can see that they both have a CS-80 and the DD, and both strongly agreed that it was the UI... and I'd have to take their word for it given that they are both know what they're talking about (Dave is the owner of GForce Software).

Do you have a link to the video? I was able to find Dave Spiers talking about the CS-80 on SonicState, but it doesn't look like the DD was part of the discussion.

I do have this Loopop review of the DD that compares to the CS-80: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNf0kpidGc4

That says they made various updates (e.g. MPE support, more presets) but seems to suggest it's pretty similar. The biggest deficit is lack of some effects and the ring mod, which are available in an expander.

The main control area looks very similar. The form factor is definitely different and maybe the CS-80 would be more ergonomic. It certainly oughta be, since prices on reverb.com go from $60K to $90K.

> Do you have a link to the video? I was able to find Dave Spiers talking about the CS-80 on SonicState, but it doesn't look like the DD was part of the discussion.

Here's Ty holding up the DD saying it sounds nice, but its not a CS-80:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=unY34O7NZ10&t=3124s

Hearing Sonic Talk's whole discussion on the CS-80 is interesting:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=unY34O7NZ10&t=3124s

... regardless, even Behringer's CS-80 clone sounds a bit out of reach for me, but how long would that take given we're yet to see more demos of the UB-Xa in months!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com