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acreil · 26th July 2010

Mostly I had naively wondered if the vintage "discrete DSP" architecture had some speed advantage over a general purpose DSP. I was thinking of how, for example, the hardware implementation of FM in the Yamaha DX7 (and to a lesser extent, the Synergy) is far more efficient than software running on a DSP. But of course this is based on clever use of shift registers and avoiding multiplication, and doesn't really apply to reverb.

I think a better explanation is that the difficulty of the problem in the early years attracted a more dedicated class of designer that was willing to spend a great deal of time experimenting and refining the algorithms. They worked well ahead of any published research, without necessarily having a great deal of prior knowledge of artificial reverberation, or even much of a preconceived notion of what digital reverb is supposed to sound like.

That's extremely impressive, and more than a little humbling when I can get something basic happening in about an hour, but then I'm too lazy to tune it much better than "not completely awful".

Also, on a somewhat related note, are the Ursa Major products the only ones that used significant analog processing inside the actual reverb engine?

26th July 2010	#540
acreil Lives for gear Joined: May 2010 Posts: 722	Mostly I had naively wondered if the vintage "discrete DSP" architecture had some speed advantage over a general purpose DSP. I was thinking of how, for example, the hardware implementation of FM in the Yamaha DX7 (and to a lesser extent, the Synergy) is far more efficient than software running on a DSP. But of course this is based on clever use of shift registers and avoiding multiplication, and doesn't really apply to reverb. I think a better explanation is that the difficulty of the problem in the early years attracted a more dedicated class of designer that was willing to spend a great deal of time experimenting and refining the algorithms. They worked well ahead of any published research, without necessarily having a great deal of prior knowledge of artificial reverberation, or even much of a preconceived notion of what digital reverb is supposed to sound like. That's extremely impressive, and more than a little humbling when I can get something basic happening in about an hour, but then I'm too lazy to tune it much better than "not completely awful". Also, on a somewhat related note, are the Ursa Major products the only ones that used significant analog processing inside the actual reverb engine?