I sold my DX-7 so many years ago, I forgot how complex FM Synthesis was!

This unit, WITH THE CD-ROM PROGRAMMER that comes with the synth, is incredible. It has seven banks of 128 sounds you can dump into the user memory area, and hear all your favorite DX voices, as the ones programmed on board are extremely bizarre. They are strange noises that morph a great deal to the assigned rhythms.

To be honest, I never could get my DX-7 to sound this out of control. Normally, it was always so exact with voices, it got boring very fast. :*( This was before Sound Diver stuff and everything, though.

Also, what amazed me is that the DX-200 can sound exactly like an analog synthesizer. That was another frustrating thing I could never coax out of my DX-7 Keyboard.

With the FM knob there, it reminds me of when I go bananas with my Nord Lead 2 Rack unit, turning up the FM on that, getting very edgy, sharp noise. This is neat.

Also, the DX200 unit is stereo out. The DX-7 Keyboard was not. Plus, with the CD-ROM Programmer, you are opened to a ton of effects that can be overlaid with the sounds, thickening out whatever you want.

The strange thing is this...if you tweak the face of the DX-200, it only allows you partial access to the incredible depth of programming possible with the free computer editor. I was impressed with what was on the surface, but about lost my mind when I realized there was so much more there.

Also, I thought the fact that the drum noises being sampled kind of sucked and would limit me.

It doesn't! You have full control over manipulating any of the samples, and can feed them through the knobs, filtering them, if you wish. In that sense, you're not confined to a static noise. It can be changed to the point where recognition is impossible. This is way cool.

Also, it's a cheap unit.

You need one.

Skip the AN-200...the analog model. The DX-200, I found, does both jobs of FM precision and analog insanity very well !!

:)

michael

You can flame me all you want defending your desicion to buy this machine and if it is worth the money to you thats great but in the year 2001 I expect a machine based on a 17 year old technolgy to do just a little bit more..

But you DO know that you can't really harness the power of FM with this box, right? WHY have FM synthesis if you're only going to use it like a subtractive?!?! When you give up the deep operating system and replace it with some knobs and a 3-digit led, you lose control of the hundreds of features that made the DX7 such a professional synth in its day - keyboard parameter scaling, for example, which is why Speckledomen noted in his review that many of the patches sound different in a higher register. You are now stuck with ADSR's instead of 8-point envelopes, which are crucial to FM because modulators can have an L4 greater than 0. And the subtle interaction of carrier and modulator CANNOT be summed up with a single knob marked "harmonics"!

FM certainly is more versatile and powerful than subtractive. Go Yamaha (or John Chowning?) for having pioneered it. But for the $500 that the DX200 retails at, you can pick up an MC-303 for your canned analog and beats (vastly superior, if that's your thing), and probably have enough left over to go pick up a REAL DX7 at a garage sale for $100 somewhere (it's happened to me twice now).

I wish that this unit was mulitimbral, but for the money (I paid about $340) I don't think this unit can be beat...

The manual does really suck though, and it *really* lacks in explaing the MIDI functionality. There isn't really much to the MIDI functionality of this unit, but still be prepared to figure this out on your own, because the manual doesn't go much more in depth than how to conenct MIDI cables. I havent had a chance to toy with the software yet, but I look forward to doing so.