I'm back :)
Well, I started to investigate this more thoroughly and it was straight down a
rabbit hole into a maze of twisty-turney passages :(
If you run the synths with *exactly* identical settings then both current zyn
and yoshi sound almost the same as original zyn - there's a joke in there :)
They are however both slightly different and further different from each other.
There are provisos though. These days I can only do forward references. In the
first place ancient zyn doesn't have some of the modern features. Also on
current systems it can save instrument patches but not load them - not even
ones it has just saved :(
What I've been doing is to create a sound in old zyn, save it (keeping it still
alive) then load both modern synths, link them all up to jack and to my
keyboard and alternately enable/disable all three while playing. That way I
can get a pretty instant comparison.
That exact match? Well, with the modern synths, if you have unison set to
greater than 6 the saved files will not be the same. However, if you look at
the settings in the respective windows and set them the same there, then they
will be. This is because zyn uses a list whereas yoshi uses a spin box. We give
you every possible value in the range. They go up in progressively bigger steps
after 6.
Until today, there were some settings you couldn't make in yoshi. This was
because for some reason the internal and external buffers had become 'fused'
together. In the current master, they are separate again. There are valid
reasons for wanting them different, but over the middle ranges 256 & 512 it's
quite difficult to detect any change in the sound.
More complete testing of this on my DAW (which has much better audio kit
than my office machine) turned up another oddity. I decided to cross-check with
alsa audio, only as soon as I did so yoshi crashed... and so did zyn!
It turns out that in the dim, distant past it was assumed that all sound cards
would run 16 bit audio. That was quite valid then, but now a lot of external
cards don't support it. Most of us are so used to Jack (which hides these gory
details) that we haven't noticed.
When I re-enabled the on-board sound system we were back in business. The good
news is that (so far) all the machines I can get my hands on work correctly
with on-board sound but that may not always be the case, so as a side issue
I'll work on getting us up to speed.
And as for 'Bubbles'? well there can be differences and we can get the two
pretty damn close. On yoshi it always sounds slightly 'smoother' than new zyn
but pretty close to original zyn :)
I prefer smooth!
--
Will J Godfrey
http://www.musically.me.uk
Say you have a poem and I have a tune.
Exchange them and we can both have a poem, a tune, and a song.