The machine has never crashed, and has performed flawlessly in almost every respect - and this was only a prototype! Production models will be available in late January/early February 1990. The owner's manual was not available for most of the (short) review period but I unearthed no glaring problems, despite some serious exploration of the SY77's quieter back-alleys. The factory sounds will probably be different, so I will not concentrate on those which came with the review instrument. Therefore some of the functions I am about to describe may have changed slightly in the final design. The SY77 I (and other reviewers) have been using is a prototype version, not a fully finished production line model. Imagine an instrument which has the potential to sound like a D50 LA synth, an M1 AI synth, a U20 using Resynthesized PCM, a Phase Distortion CZ synth, a K5 Additive synth (with up to 32 harmonics), a Clavinova, a DX7, an Oberheim or Prophet Analogue synth, a CS80 using Ring Modulation to warp sound, and more - plus any mixture of these, and some new ones! It looks like I don't need to wait for a Resynthesizer - the SY77 can sound like almost any keyboard, and it is here now! In the past it has always been necessary for musicians to acquire a mixture of different methods of producing sounds (analogue, sampled, digital, etc), but the SY77 makes that approach virtually redundant. It has the widest range of potential sound-producing capability I have ever witnessed in an 'affordable' instrument - from fully synthetic to breathtakingly real, all in very high quality stereo (or even quad, for those who remember it!).
The SY77 is a multitimbral, Advanced FM plus AWM workstation, modestly described on the front panel as a 'music synthesizer'.
Next month will see a detailed examination of the synthesis power provided by the SY77's new synthesis method: RCM. In this, the first of two articles taking an in-depth look at the SY77, I will describe the major features of this new Yamaha flagship synth. With the arrival (at last!) of what must surely be the replacement for the DX7, the SY77 provides a new synthesis method which builds on FM, but which also presents an interesting mix of simplicity and complexity.
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