ZincTrumpet
Good find abacab. I have been giving it a serious listen.
Enjoyed this video review (the D50 starts at about 11:30):- https://youtu.be/XuZxF7j89zE
Ha! Good find ZT! I must say I can really appreciate that YouTube guy's enthusiasm, even with the English subtitles, LOL!!! He can play the crap out of those iRig keys!
But I'm still not sold on samples of a digital synth, because I would expect any good emulation for a synth of that era to be able to produce the sounds digitally.
I bought my first synth, a digital Casio CZ-1000 back in the mid-80's (which used Casio's version of phase distortion, a close cousin to Yamaha's FM used in the DX-7), after taking a demo tour of the available synths in my budget range in the local music store. In the end it came down to that one and an analog Roland Juno (Juno-something, cannot recall) that was a very cool analog synth, but with no MIDI, no patch memory, and only 6 voices. That was fun, but I went home, broke but happy with the Casio. It had some great printed manuals that explained all about oscillators, ADSR, envelopes, etc. School, LOL!
My only regret to this day was possibly not grabbing that Roland Juno new when I had the chance! LOL! Hindsight 20/20 and all that!
I have had several other digital synths after that from Roland, Alesis, and Korg (the X-series, that followed the M1). Most of them were romplers, that tried to emulate acoustic instruments with sample sets, rather than through organic synthesis. They were successful and made great sounds, but...
There is something about synthesis, whether analog or digital, that is different from sampling. I realize that the D-50 used single cycle waveforms to begin the synthesis process, but that is to be expected with a digital method, that is not actually using analog oscillators. Even many modern soft-synths use single cycle samples in their oscillator sections.
So the Casio CZ series, the Yamaha DX-7, and the Roland D-50 were the new kings of the digital synth era, for a while anyways...
So this has been long-winded, but have you checked out Dexed, a FREE Yamaha DX-7 emulation with a buttload of DX7 libraries freely available on the net?
https://www.kvraudio.com/product/dexed-by-digital-suburban Highly recommended, and is probably the most accurate DX-7 emulation available. The sounds this can make will blow the D-50 away, IMHO.
