A DX7 USB Dongle
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https://diyelectromusic.wordpress.com/2023/11/22/a-dx7-usb-d...
[1] Keyboard not literally 10 tons, it just feels that way when lugging it to and from the van to the gig, typically about 40lbs in the case with accessories.
https://www.thomann.de/nl/native_instruments_komplete_kontro...
They have Fatar keyboards which is more than good enough.
Also, consider that even playing an acoustic piano has quite some lag: your brain has to send a signal to the muscles in your hand, which have to contract, which presses the key which takes some time to travel down, the hammers needs some time to travel to the strings, then the sound takes some time to travel to your ear. All this adds up to many milliseconds of delay. A musician already compensates for all that by starting the hand motions earlier to compensate for that lag. As long as it is not too large and if it is consistent, a few milliseconds extra does not matter.
So it's like the difference between how far a pianist sits from the strings in an upright vs a grand piano. Or the guitar player taking a couple of steps away from their amp. Or the difference between a drummer hitting the snare or their crash cymbal.
One of my local theatres says the stage is 19m wide, so an orchestra playing there is probably 50 ms apart for onmstruments playing on opposite sides of the stage.
Hell, you've got most of a millisecond of "lag" between your left and right ears for sounds coming from the side.
The difference between your right and your left ear is indeed on that order and so phase change really starts at roughly that frequency and below that it all just blends together. That's why bass speakers aren't directional and you can have a single big woofer in the middle and it won't make much of a difference in what the sound is like in the stereo image. But if you collapse your high or mid then suddenly all sense of position is gone.
So anything below 1 ms is negligible, as long as it isn't so long that it starts to confuse you. Not rare in church organs, where the lag can be so long that you wonder if you've depressed the key at all, you get used to it after a while but it is a very weird experience.
It's interesting that you can spot an out-of-phase wired woofer fairly easily by just moving around the room, if the sound of the bases cancels out in the middle that usually a good sign that either woofer has its polarity reversed from what it should be. The sound will be 'hollow' (I have no better term for it, that's what it sounds like to me).
(Surely that church organ delay is an artefact of the pneumatics, not the speed of sound travel time between the player and the various pipes?)
Super confusing, the best way to deal with it is to just put on headphones and only listen to the direct sound.
"Hollow" is a good description. It's the weird missing fundamental [1] sound you can get from a high pass filter.
Each percent of swing is 2.5ms. So if you increase to 51% swing, it's 127.5ms and 122.5ms between successive pairs of 26th notes. 55% swing (which is very distinct from 50% to my ears) is 137.5ms and 112.5ms.
I once recorded an album and had to deal with latency issues. This was way back using an IBM Aptiva and Magix music software (because it was pretty affordable). I spent so much time trying to figure out why my vocals were behind the beat. Eventually I worked out the correction factor to be 1.002433. So that's what I named the album!
Since then, I'm glad that latency problems are much less of a problem. Nothing worse than a little latency if you have ears like Donald Fagan. :-)
I repair DX-7's to keep them alive (usually three broken ones yield about two good ones and some spare bits), I can look for KX-88's while looking for DX-7s if you want.
Go grab it then! For that kind of money you really can't go wrong.
Which is very cool, but "USB Dongle" confused me a bit.
I was researching using the Pi Pico for FM synthesis recently, it turns out it isn't powerful enough to do more than about 3 voices of 6-operator FM due to having no fpu.
Here's the hardware docs page:
I'm in NL and sending it in the mail isn't an option.
For what it's worth, being "that good" is relatively easy for a DX7 compared to other synthesizers since it's a purely digital design and the algorithms (in the software, not FM sense) are pretty straightforward. It's not like emulating, say, an Ensoniq SQ-80, where you have to emulate analog filters which always involves a level of compromise and approximation.
There are a few VST plugins (thinking of Plogue’s OPS7 and Reason’s Algorithm in particular) that can do this and I think you have a lot of control with the Korg Opsix but I don’t know if a Dexed/miniDexed design that does that.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/success-stories/korg-synthesizer...
I have a Pharmasonic ROM cartridge for mine.
Then find myself with the same problem and go through the same research and come to the same conclusion.
The net costs are just rent in my mind. Or the difference between getting a great deal and paying more than I might have. Or just money I spent on my hobby.