Yamaha SY22, Roland D-50, Korg Wavestation, and Kawai K5

[rickyd]

Has anyone had the pleasure of having all of these synths in your rig at one time? In either case (Whether you had them all at once or at different times), what was your experiences like with them? Which do you think sound better overall for the type of music that YOU do?

As you see, this is not a true VERSUS question, but I just like to see different opinions based on personal experience, as well as the creative ideas of others.

Talk away!

[meatballfulton]

I owned the K5. At the time I couldn't understand how to program my own sounds on it and the small LCD screen for editing didn't help in that regard. Additive synthesis is the complete opposite of subtractive synthesis (doh), rather than using filters to remove harmonics you build up the harmonics you want. That's nice in theory but knowing ahead of time what a particular harmonic structure will sound like was not intuitive. The overall sound is like most 80s digitals, on the cold side.

Believe it or not, I traded an ARP Odyssey for mine. Stupid trade

[rickyd]

I owned the K5. At the time I couldn't understand how to program my own sounds on it and the small LCD screen for editing didn't help in that regard. Additive synthesis is the complete opposite of subtractive synthesis (doh), rather than using filters to remove harmonics you build up the harmonics you want. That's nice in theory but knowing ahead of time what a particular harmonic structure will sound like was not intuitive. The overall sound is like most 80s digitals, on the cold side.

Believe it or not, I traded an ARP Odyssey for mine. Stupid trade

Lol, yea, you probably shoulv'e kept it.

I heard samples of all of the mentioned (Well, I own the Wavestation though) except for the Kawai K5. I was wondering if there was a certain character to additive synthesis that would stand out or something.

[Pro5]

Gonna sound like a broken record here but the D-50 is in a different class to those other synths you mention. The wavestation was cool enough of course... and still useful (if you don't want softare like atmosphere or something).

D-50 just nails it on so many levels, a beautiful bit of kit - but don't listen to me, I'm biased