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Re: the smallest portable hardware keyboard synth



Rick Walker schrieb:
> I even discovered that if I put even a prosaic sounding
> distortion box after it, that I could come up with some very
> hip, modern industrial sounds out of fairly normal patches.
This is of course something that is true for a lot of cheesy synths. 
Anyone remember the Adlib soundcard (a very early PC synthesizer sound 
card, which used the same synth as the first SoundBlaster - Yamaha 
YM3812)? That thing sounded like - well, an extremely cheesy and cheap 
digital synth - unless you put it through a Sherman Filterbank, followed 
by a Tubescreamer (I was extremely surprised back in the day when a 
Techno producer showed me how he had done the very punchy bass line on 
one of his productions in this way).
> Also EMU had a series called the Proteus.   Their flagship was the
> Proteus 2000 and there are a lot of the for sale on e-bay for around
> $250 USD........they just had a zillion useful sounds in them.
The flagship was the Proteus 2500 (which wouldn't apply in Luis' quest, 
as it was a 4HU device with a lot of realtime controllers thrown in), 
and as you mentioned, there were not only a zillion sounds in them, but 
a zillion variants.
Based on a stripped-down version of the EIII sampler architecture, this 
was the architecture that defined practically all of E-mu's ROM player 
products from 1989 up until 2001 (and also the ESi-32 sampler).
> A lot of keyboard people would be snobby about them because they 
> didn't have the kind of control that a lot of fancy analogue synths 
> had, but that wasn't what
> they were designed for.   EMU, by the way, had really amazing filters 
> in them...............some of the best out there and, if I"m not 
> mistaken the later
> Proteus's had them onboard.
E-mu was always cool for filters - the innovation in the Proteus line 
were the so-called Z-Plane filters (14-pole filters, which they decided 
to give a signal theory name), first introduced in the Morpheus, and 
then contained in most model after that.
And they had a lot of control possibilities - only not on the front 
panel. While I'm not sure about the exact numbers, all Proteus models 
featured both a flexible modulation structure (at the time only 
available in modular synths or Oberheim's Matrix series) and the 
possibility to use various MIDI CCs to control parameters in realtime.

Later models would also allow you to install additional sound banks 
(i.e. sample waveforms); they came with 32MB but allowed for up to three 
additional modules. And as you already mentioned, the Proteus already 
had a lot of variants - Vintage Keys, Plane Whatever (there were World, 
and Phatt etc.), B3, andsoon - and the Audity 2000 with an unparalleled 
sixteen arpeggiators.

There are also different form factors available: two named "Command 
Station" (desktop version with trigger pads) and two named "Keys" (a 
5-octave-keyboard version).

And if you're still not convinced: how about a free download of a 
software version to just try the thing?
http://en.audiofanzine.com/partner/a.proteusvx.html

Downside: the smallest ones are 1HU full width.

             Rainer

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