Automatic Gainsay wrote:
I'm not sure that that is a more accurate statement. Very few of those components don't affect the sound-generating aspect. What notes going where has an affect on how the synthesizer sounds. Preset switching is nothing but hard-wired connections between functions, and really has little to do with circuitry. Even so, though... the way that those presets sound depends on how those connections are made. Perhaps not in gigantically overt ways... but the benefit of analog synthesizers has rarely been an overt sound.
Not sure I agree with you there. I could use a DLA and model with 100% accuracy, to the point that no existing device could possibly measure or distinguish the difference between the original CS-80 digital logic and that which I implemented in software. But that is just the purely digital side, see additional comments below with regards to interaction with the analog components.
Automatic Gainsay wrote:
What on Earth are you talking about?
Hey I reserve the right to be inarticulate when arguing on the Internet

I was trying to say that the subjective quality of whether or not a synth sounds "good" is not
exclusively a function of its circuit topology. Good sounding synths come in the form of digital VA's, hybrids, discreet design, and those chock full proprietary IC's and components. Likewise, there are plenty of shitty sounding synths that also use the same topology, be it digital, discreet analog, or whatever.
Automatic Gainsay wrote:
You don't recreate a synthesizer inaccurately simply to use the name because the average person can't tell... that is the stupidest idea in the world.
Tell that to Dave Smith, Moog, Korg and Roland
Automatic Gainsay wrote:
All it takes is one person who DOES know to say "that doesn't sound or feel like the original" and your marketing is worthless... making your device worthless.
I just don't think this is completely true in terms "worth" being defined as product sales. PLENTY of people have said similar things about the MS-20 re-issue or the TB-3 but that hasn't seemed to impact sales. "Worth" in terms of authenticity to synth nerds like us, then yeah, you are spot on.
Automatic Gainsay wrote:
You NEED the most experienced CS-80 player in the world to say "yep, this thing is just like the original" for it to be worth making at all. And those changes, however subtle you'd like to portray them, are going to be obvious to, say, Kent Spong.
Nobody is trying to sell a synth to Kent Spong. I understand exactly what you are saying and I actually agree with you for the most part. Modern "recreations" are, at the end of the day, a sham. But a genuine, authentic vintage CS-80 reissue would not be a popular instrument. Price aside, just the feature set alone would not appeal to the vast majority ("Why can't I hook this up to Ableton?"). It's only synth nerds like us that actually care about these subtleties and we are a very, very small market segment.
My theoretical "modernized" CS-80 (which, technically, isn't a CS-80 so we'd need to call it a CS-80 Mk II or CS-8000 or something) would probably offend most of us, and Kent Spong, but if it had 80% of the CS-80 charm in a modern package the appeal would be quite broad imo. s**t, are we just debating semantics? If I just call it a different name is this whole discussion moot?
Automatic Gainsay wrote:
It VERY MUCH matters if the envelopes and LFOs are voltage because voltage sounds different than digitally generated.
This treads dangerously close to the "$1000 HDMI cable" snake oil territory. If you have a sufficiently high-res D/A converter this argument starts to get pretty weak (from my perspective which is probably more engineer and less musician). However, capturing the
exact curve (under all possible states) of the LFO/Envs from the original CS-80 design is probably no easy feat, especially if you account for the
extremely subtle distortions caused by other circuitry in the machine indirectly affecting the LFOs/Envs. That said, I don't want to discount it. Anyone who has ever played a real TR-909 versus samples of a TR-909 knows that the subtle interactions between the digital and analogue components of that machine are crucial to its "magic".