From prophet5@atlantic.netWed Nov 20 15:32:58 1996 Date: Thu, 14 Nov 1996 15:58:32 -0500 From: Jason Ninch To: Mike Perkowitz Subject: Re: Original Keyboard report on the Chroma Polaris by Jim Aikin [The following text is in the "iso-8859-1" character set] [Your display is set for the "US-ASCII" character set] [Some characters may be displayed incorrectly] At 12:41 PM 11/14/96 -0800, you wrote: > >> Its OCRed so its not that big. I'll send it to you in a sec. > >cool! that will be great :) > >mike I can't find the manual right now but here is the original Prophet 600 review. I will also include a list of other equipment I have reviews for after the P600 review. Sorry about the Polaris manual. Osc Sequential Prophet-600 May 1983 By Jim Aikin Scanned and OCRed by Oscillate IF YOU'VE GOT A few hundred dollars more to spend than you'd need for the Poly-61,you might look-into the Prophet- 600 from Sequential ($1,995.00 list). This instrument has several additional fea- tures, although it is missing a couple of items that the Poly-61 has. Both instru- ments have five-octave, C-to-C keyboards. The Prophet-600's front panel, unlike the. Poly-61's, is strictly functional rather than glamorous. The white lettering on a black background is easy to read, and the knobs and switches are sturdy. The basic layout is the same as that found on the 600's big brother, the Prophet-S, though some of the S's features have been elimi- nated to bring the price down. Specifi- cally, oscillator two can't be switched to LFO operation or disconnected from the keyboard control signal, and the Poly- Mod section is somewhat simplified. New features not found on the Prophet-S include polyphonic glide, chord latching, and a sequencer and arpeggiator. The Programmer The Prophet-600 holds 100 user-writ- able programs, which can be stored on and loaded from cassette tape, with the usual error-checking procedures. Pro- grams can also be loaded and stored in banks of ten programs each, which is a nice convenience feature. Programs are accessed by hitting a two-digit number on a keypad at the left end of the control panel. The keys here are membrane switches, which don't move at all when you press them. A two-digit LED tells you what program is called up, and if you've made changes in it, a small decimal point lights up between the two digits to remind you. The front-panel controls are active at all times; if you turn a control, the sound will jump, sometimes radically, from the value stored in memory to the live value shown on the knobÄnot our favorite method of operation, but certainly ade- quate. All the front-panel controls are quantized, so even though you're looking at knobs, you're dealing with discrete values just like those you enter directly using the Poly-61's programmer. Some of the Prophet-600's controls seem to have no more value settings than the Poly-61's do, but others have a great many more. Oscillator two, for example, can be tuned to any half-step over a four-octave range, as can oscillator one. Arpeggiator & Sequencer Just to the right of the programmer keypad is a set of four membrane switches and a knob that activate the arpeggiator and the sequencer. The Prophet-600 will hold two separate poly- phonic sequences with real-time loading from the keyboard. The sequences must share a total of about 400 notes, and if you exceed this limit, the sequencer will "wrap around," stealing notes from the beginning of sequence two to finish re- cording sequence one. If you're playing lots of thick chords, 400 notes probably isn't enough to record a whole tune, but for short repeating phrases it's plenty. Both the sequencer and the arpeggiator use a footswitch. When recording a se- quence, you can hit the footswitch at the end, and the sequence will start playing back immediately. We found it very easy to get it to start its loop right on the beat. The arpeggiator offers a choice between two modes-up/down and assign. In up/down, you get a standard arpeggio pattern (no repeating notes). In assign mode, the arpeggiator plays the notes back in whatever order you played them in, so if you want an arpeggio that goes up but not down or vice versa, all you have to do is play the notes in that order. The footswitch functions to latch the arpeggio so it keeps playing after you lift your hands off. Hit the switch a second time and the arpeggio or sequence will stop. The arpeggiator and sequencer won't function at the same time. However, the sequencer does remember your se- quences when it's turned off. Sequences can also be stored on tape. Speed of se- quencer and arpeggiator can be adjusted with a knob, and a new sequencer- playback speed can be programmed to be called up independent of the current knob setting. Modulation Section The Prophet-600 offers modulation from three sources. The LEO modulation section is separate from the Poly-Mod sec- tion, and the latter offers modulation from either oscillator two or the filter envelope. LEO modulation can be either a triangle wave or a square wave. Initial amount and frequency are adjustable, and desti- nations can be selected from among (1) the frequency of the two oscillators, (2) the pulse width of the two oscillators, and (3) the filter cutoff frequency. The modulation wheel in the leff-hand con- troller section adds to the amount set by the initial-amount pot. Ida too bad you can't modulate one oscillator without the other. It also seems to us that the LEO fre- quency won't go fast enough. Its upper limit is about 6Hz-a good rate for vibrato, but too slow for those fast buzz- ing and pulsing effects. The Poly-Mod section offers amount pots from two sources-oscillator two and the filter envelope-which can be routed to either the frequency of oscillator one, the filter, or both. Since oscillator one can be synced to oscillator two, this section allows for a wide variety of timbral effects, including clangorous FM effects. We did notice an anomalous interaction among the various pots. What happens is that when you listen only to osc 1, turn osc 2's pitch control up an octave or a tenth or so, and turn the osc 2 amount knob up in the Poly-Mod section, the six voices don't all give you the same pitch. This is great if you like sour-sounding out-of-tune chords, but it does deny you access to a potentially useful set of FM timbres for normal-intonation playing. Oscillators There are two oscillators, with osc 1 syncable to osc 2. Sawtooth, triangle, and pulse waves are available in any combi- nation, and pulse width is adjustable over a wide range as well as controllable from the LFO modulation section. Each oscilla- tor has a range adjustable over four octaves in half-steps, and oscillator two can also be detuned up to a half-step with a fine-tuning knob. The mixer section is a single pot arranged so that at 12 o-clock both oscillators are full up; as you turn it to the left, oscillator two gradually drops out, and to the right, oscillator one grad- ually drops out. Filter & VCA Both the filter and the VCA have ADSR envelope generators. In addition, the filter has the usual cutoff-frequency, resonance-amount, and envelope-amount knobs, with a switch for selecting full key- board tracking, half keyboard tracking, or none. The filter can be set to resonate so strongly it will oscillate on its own, which comes in handy once in a while. The master volume is not programmable. MIDI Interface One of the most interesting features of the Prophet-600 is a pair of jacks on the back that function as the input and output for MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) signals. MIDI is a system that allows two computer-based instruments to talk to one another. This idea is still in its infancy; eventually, MIDI connections may become a commonplace item, but so far, the Prophet-600 is the only instru- ment equipped with them. In order to test MIDI, we got two Prophet-600s and hooked them together. With this setup in its current form, you can do several things. You can select the same num- bered program on both Prophets simul- taneously from the program-select key- pad of the master instrument. You can, obviously, play both instruments from one keyboard. You can also use the pitch- bend and modulation wheels on the mas- ter to control the slave (or not do so, if you only want to bend pitch on one instru- ment for a special effect). Or you can load patch programs directly from one Prophet to another without bothering with the cassette interface. The simplest application for MIDI is to play two different tone colors at the same time from one keyboard (equivalent to a double mode on more expensive synthe- sizers like the Oberheim OB-8 and the Prophet-10). But there are more interest- ing uses. For example, you can have separate sequences or arpeggios running on the two Prophet-600s simultaneously. These won't by synced, of course, so they won't stay in phase with one another, but for complex swirls of color, locked phase isn't necessarily what you want. In a situation like this, the master 600 will only play its own sequence-but the slave 600 will play them both simultaneously (as long as the chords aren't so thick that its six-voice capacity is overloaded). Both keyboards are still live while this is going on, so you can add further notes by hand. Back Panel The Prophet-600's back panel is real simple. It has in and out jacks for the cas- sette interface, a footswitch input, a filter CV input, an arpeggiator-clock input, and an audio output, all of which are 1/4" phone jacks, and a pair of S-pin DIN jacks for MIDI input and output. The power cord, unlike the Poly-61's, is detachable. Conclusions In general, we were quite impressed with the Prophet-600. Those of you who are familiar with the Prophet-S may miss the more extensive Poly-Mod section on that instrument, but the 600 has been streamlined for the more typical keyboard applications rather than for special effectsÄand it does have an arpeggiator and a sequencer, which the S doesn't. Having only one LFO is something of a limitation, and some players may be bothered by the fact that the pitch-bend wheel's depth of response can't be adjusted. But the instrument offers a wide variety of pleasing musical sounds, and the ability to load and store programs in sets of ten rather than 100 at a time is sure to be helpful in working out a set that has new tunes added. If the MIDI idea catches on (which we hope it will), the Prophet-600 could easily become the basic keyboard for an extended setup. Dimensions are: 37 l/2" long x 4 1/4" high x 12" deep; 22 Ibs. First released in 1982. No longer manu- factured Last list price: $1,995.OO. ________________________________________________________________________ Contents Foreword 2 I. How To Buy A Synthesizer 3 IL Early Polyphonic Synthesizers Part I 7 ARP Quadra 11 Emu 4060 13 Korg PS3300 (PS3100) 15 Moog Polymoog 17 Multivox MX-3000 19 Oberheim Four-Voice 20 RMI KC-II 22 Roland JP-4 23 Sequential Prophet 5 25 Yamaha CS-80 26 IIL Synthesizers, Sampling Units, Drum Machines, & SequencersÄ The Keyboard Reports 29 AKAI AX80 30 Casio CZ-101 31 Chroma The Chroma 33 Chroma Polaris 35 Crumar Spirit 38 Decillionix DX-1 Digital Sampling System 39 Digital Keyboards Synergy 4 1 Digital Keyboards Synergy II+ 43 Electro Harmonix Super Replay Digital Sampler 46 Emu Drumulator 47 Emu Emulator 48 Emu Emulator II S. 1 Ensoniq Mirage Digital Sampling Keyboard 54 Garfield Electronics Doctor Click Rhythm Controller 56 Garfield Electronics Doctor Click 2 58 Kawai SX-210 59 Korg DW-6000 61 Korg Mono/Poly & Polysix 62 Korg Poly-61 66 Korg Poly-800 67 Kurzweil 250 Digital Sampling Keyboard 69 Linn Electronics LinnDrum 73 Moog Liberation 75 Moog Memorymoog 77 Moog Rogue & Sequential Pro-One 80 Oberheim Matrix-12 83 Oberheim OB-8, DSX, & DMX 84 Oberheim OB-Xa 89 Oberheim Xpander 92 Octave Plateau Voyetra Eight & VPK-5 Keyboard 96 Oxford Oscar 98 Passport Designs Soundchaser PPG Wave 2.2 PPG Wave 2.2 to 2.3 Update Roland Juno-106 Roland Jupiter-6 Roland JX-8P Roland MKB-1000 MIDI Keyboard M JKS-80 Super Jupiter Roland MSQ-100 MIDI Digital Keyboard Recorder Roland SH-101 Roland TR-606 Drumatix Sequential Multi-Trak & Tom Drum Mac,hine Sequential Prophet-T8 Sequential Prophet-10 Sequential Prophet-600 Sequential Six-Trak & Drumtraks Serge Modular Series 79 Siel DK-600 & Expander Syntauri Alpha Syntauri Synton Modular System 360 Systems Digital Playback Keyboard Yamaha CE20 - GS2 Yamaha CS01 Yamaha CS20-20M Yamaha DX7 Yamaha RXl l Digital Drum Machine IV. More Synthesizes, Sampling Units, Drum Machines, & SequencersÄ The Spec Sheets AIM Wasp, AKA1612 Sampler, ARP Odyssey, ARP Pro-DGX, ARP Solus, ARP 2600, Buchla 406 Buchla Touche, Electro-Harmonix Mini Synthesizer, EMS VCS3 Mark II, Korg EX800, Korg MS-20 & MS-10, Korg MS-50, Korg PS 3200, Korg SDD 2000, Linn LM-1 Linn 9000, Moog Micromoog, Moog Minimoog, Moog Multimoog, Moog Source, Oberheim DX, Oberheim OB-1 Oberheim OB-X, Octave-Plateau Cat, Performance Music Syntar, Roland JP-8, Roland Juno-6, Roland Juno-60 Roland MSQ-700, Roland SH-5, Roland SH-7, Roland TR-707, Roland TR-909, Sequential Max, Steiner-Parker Synthacon, Strider DCS II Yamaha CS-5 & CS-15, Yamaha CS-40M, Yamaha QX1, Yamaha TX216 & TX 816 Index Of Eqrugment About The Authors Manufacturer Addresses