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If people are interested in the DX7's technical details, I've done some work reverse-engineering it, and some of Yamaha's other FM synths: https://ajxs.me/blog/tag/DX7.html

Ken Shirriff has also done some amazing work analysing the DX7's sound chips: https://www.righto.com/2021/11/reverse-engineering-yamaha-dx...

A really awesome documentary on the DX7 by MadFame: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXt_NXjc7oY

There are a lot of software emulations of the DX7 that are quite realistic, like the amazing Dexed. Here's one that deserves a lot of credit for how accurate it is: https://github.com/chiaccona/VDX7




The design of the DX7 ASIC is really quite astonishing. They used every trick they could think of to make it work given the technology limitations, like a 96-step shift register and using a lookup table to produce the sine wave. The lookup table is clever, too, storing only half the table, and storing log2() of the values instead of the original value so they can use addition instead of multiplication to compute the operators.


and all these tricks to generate oscillators are still used to this day in digital hardware and software synthesizers:

https://aaltodoc.aalto.fi/server/api/core/bitstreams/803386d...


>Here's one that deserves a lot of credit for how accurate it is: https://github.com/chiaccona/VDX7

I read "bit-accurate" and immediately went Ctrl+F "rate": "It then resamples from the native 49khz sample rate", yeah, this one is serious!


There’s a decent supercollider implementation as well

https://github.com/everythingwillbetakenaway/DX7-Supercollid...


Dexed is great, and Arturia has another that is just as accurate.

https://www.arturia.com/products/software-instruments/dx7-v/...


Somehow related, another excellent youtube channel on old retro keyboards: https://www.youtube.com/c/KeenOnKeys




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