[LAU] Hardware synths

David Olofson david at olofson.net
Sat Dec 1 21:56:47 EST 2007


On Sunday 02 December 2007, david wrote:
[...]
> David Olofson wrote:
> 
> >> What is thicker?
> > 
> > Now, that is probably very subjective, but in general, it would be
> > a sound with more information in it. For example, some sounds are 
> > improved by adding slightly detuned oscillators in large numbers. 
> > (Well, most sounds, if you're into "organic" or analog/acoustic
> > feel sounds in general.)
> 
> I recently discovered that the Yamaha PSR-740 has both a "Sine Wave" 
> voice and a "Thick Sine" voice. There is a big difference between
> the two, yet you can tell that they're both using sine waves. So
> that's my empirical experience of what is "thicker".

I'd guess one of them is pretty close to a perfect sine whereas the 
other - obviously - is not.

Why not record and FFT them? If you can hear a difference in timbre, 
the FFT spectrum should tell you why. If you can hit an FFT bin dead 
center, you should get a single peak with a pure sine, and various 
extra peaks with other waveforms.


//David Olofson - Programmer, Composer, Open Source Advocate

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