source file: mills2.txt Date: Sun, 29 Oct 1995 08:35:42 -0800 From: "John H. Chalmers" From: mclaren Subject: Our friends at Ensoniq --- To date little has been said regarding the Ensoniq corporation. Someone needs to point out how much we owe people like Steve Curtin, and his fellow Ensoniq engineers. Let's start with the fact that if you want a sampler with built-in tuning tables, were it not for Ensoniq you'd be in deep guano. It's incredibly important that a sampler include a tuning table. Without one, the only reliable way to break out of 12 on a sampler is to use a separate sample for each MIDI note. This gobbles memory at a *staggering* rate. For a 2- second stereo sample at 44.1 Khz spread over (say) 36 notes, this would demand 6.05 megs of RAM *per MIDI channel.* For 16 MIDI channels, that's a mind-boggling 96.89 megs of RAM! By contrast, if your sampler allows you to use a tuning table you save an *incredible* of RAM. Moving to more than 12 tones per octave lets you spread each sample over even *more* keys than in 12--for a 31-tone equal tempered tuning, for instance, you can spread each sample over 31/12 times as many MIDI notes. This means that if you've got a multi-sampled sound that spreads each sample over (say) 3 MIDI notes in 12, a tuning table allows you to *drop* memory requirements by letting you spread each sample over 8 MIDI notes. Compare the two situations. In one case, the lack of a tuning table forces you to gobble RAM by using 36 separate samples; in the other case, a built-in tuning table lets you *save* that RAM by using only 36/7.8 = 5 separate samples. The savings in RAM is ENORMOUS: a full [1 - (36 - 5/36)] * 100 = 80%! This really matters. We're not talking about just 10% or even 20% or 30% savings of RAM here...a tuning table makes an ENORMOUS differece. It lets you use 1/2-1/6 of the memory you'd otherwise use. This is *crucial* because the problem with every sampler is lack of RAM. No matter how much you've got it's never enough. And forcing the microtonal user to burn up gobs and gobs of RAM by duplicating each sample on every single MIDI note is so wasteful as to defy description. Clearly, Ensoniq's inclusion of a tuning table (a separate tuning table for each layer of each sample, in fact) on the ASR-10 qualifies as one of the biggest gifts to microtonalists ever. Period. Of course, there's more. Ensoniq builds reliable products. They sound pretty good. Other companies have flashier technology, but Ensoniq's synths sound about as excellent as anything out there. The big *musical* advantage Ensoniq enjoys, of course, is that they've supported micrtonality by including built-in tuning tables every since 1989. I'm not sure why they made that decision--there doesn't seem to be a lot of economic benefit in tuning tables. However, I can say that I've bought a bunch of Ensoniq gear ever since they started building tuning tables into their synths. As long as they keep including tuning tables, I'll keep buying their equipment. This is particularly noteworthy behavior for a large synth manufcaturer because many of the other clueless and brain-dead synth companies still refuse to include full-keyboard microtuning. Especially the Japanese. Weird, when you think about it. Which culture uses a non-12 pentatonic scale? (The Japanese) And which culture is more frenziedly committed to 12-TET? (The Japanese!) Kawai, Akai and many others fanatically refuse to let their instruments be retuned. They're adamant about it to the point of psychosis. The behaviour is almost Manson-like in is self-destructivness, yet they persist. As a result I won't buy Kawai or Akai synths. Let 'em rot: they can come out with a synth that does everything buy makes coffee and I still wouldn't even use it as a boat anchor. Ensoniq's commitment to microtonality deserves special mention on this forum. I have nothing but good things to say about their synths. (it would nice if they dropped their prices, but then I wish all mfrs would drop their prices; what else is new?) Bottom line: if you're serious about microtonality, eventually you will discover that kludges and gyrations and contortions and weird clumy work- arounds like tuning each note with pitch-bend, etc., just don't work after a certain point. You run out of MIDI bandwidth, notes start to get dropped, attacks sound twangy, and the logistics of such kludges just become insupportable for even moderately complex compositions. In the end, a built-in full keyboard tuning table is an absolute necessity for serious MIDI microtonality. And Ensoniq and Yamaha are the only two synth manufacturers that have consistently stuck to their support for tuning tables. Best of all, Ensoniq--unlike Yahama--has refused to throw away its best technology. Yamaha's insane decision to stop making FM synths is a mistake Ensoniq would never have made: instead, Ensoniq just keeps making its instruments bigger, better and more capable. Ensoniq refuses to give up on a product. They just keep adding features and upgrading the ROMs until the synth does everything you could reasonably want. That's a good attitude for a synth company to have, especially nowadays when the Japanese are coming out with a new model every 6 months that renders obsolete all previous RAM cartridges, editors, voice disks, etc. but doesn't sound any different or do any more than the Japanese synths of 5 years ago. Bottom line? Everyone on this forum should offer Steve Curtin and his fellow engineers at Ensoniq a very long, very appreciative round of applause. We owe them a lot. --mclaren Received: from eartha.mills.edu [144.91.3.20] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Mon, 30 Oct 1995 07:07 +0100 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id VAA17788; Sun, 29 Oct 1995 21:07:07 -0800 Date: Sun, 29 Oct 1995 21:07:07 -0800 Message-Id: <951030050412_71670.2576_HHB30-6@CompuServe.COM> Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu