> And once we have sampling technology, there’s little point using computational techniques to make the once-novel sounds of earlier synthesizers: we can just sample the instruments themselves
You can't tweak the parameters of a filter envelope if it's "printed" to a sample.
You might sample a variety of different envelopes, but there's still fundamentally no way you can get the sound of the filter attack gradually increasing using samples.
Assuming the details of the DX7 are similar to some of the PC Yamaha FM synth hardware, you could do things like set the attack/decay of a modulating operator to be very slow, the attack of a carrier to be fairly fast, and subsequent key presses wouldn't necessarily sound the same. And with a big chained algorithm like the DX7 can do, I agree, you couldn't capture the full behavior through a sample.
You could replicate the most common behavior, though.
You can't tweak the parameters of a filter envelope if it's "printed" to a sample.
You might sample a variety of different envelopes, but there's still fundamentally no way you can get the sound of the filter attack gradually increasing using samples.