On Nov 15, 2004, at 12:23 AM, Juhana Sadeharju wrote: > Has anyone compared DX7 and Hexter? Could anyone load the same > instrument to both and record the outputs for us? Yeah, I compared them all the time as I was developing hexter ;-) Here are some quick examples I threw together of how close (or not) hexter comes to a real DX7. In each one, hexter is panned hard right, and my TX7 (a DX7 in module form) is panned hard left. http://home.jps.net/~musound/chopin.mp3 This is some Chopin with random patch changes thrown in. Both the TX7 and hexter are running with 16 voice polyphony. You can hear that both hexter and the TX7 click a bit when stealing voices. Also, hexter's quite a bit more graceful when receiving a patch change via sysex -- the TX7 twangs here transitioning into the "acoustic piano" patch. http://home.jps.net/~musound/clav_and_bass.mp3 This is actually two TX7s in the left channel, and two instances of hexter in the right channel. http://home.jps.net/~musound/e_piano.mp3 Here you can hear that while hexter is pretty close to the TX7, it doesn't quite get the modulation right, resulting in a slightly brighter or more midrangy sound. http://home.jps.net/~musound/mallet.mp3 http://home.jps.net/~musound/organs.mp3 A couple more examples. http://home.jps.net/~musound/effects.mp3 This shows some of the patches hexter has the most trouble with (thanks to Frank Neumann for collecting these). Many effects patches depend on amplitude or pitch modulation, LFO, and unusual envelope generator timings. As of version 0.5.7, hexter is still lacking the DX7's AM and PM and LFO, and the odd envelope timings have so far resisted all efforts at prediction. All of the examples were generated from the same MIDI stream (both sys-ex patch dumps and notes). The TX7s were connected directly to my Delta 44, and both they and hexter were recorded simultaneously at 44.1kHz using ecasound and JACK. Audacity was used to trim and normalize the recordings (no effects other than fade-in and fade-out were used), and lame with '-h -b192' was used to encode the MP3s. These URLs should be valid for a week or two, then I may need to use the space for something else. If they don't work, try checking here: http://home.jps.net/~musound/index.html or the hexter web page at: http://dssi.sourceforge.net/hexter.html -Sean
