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> And if it hadn't been cut down enough it would have cannibalised sales of the more expensive synth. I think you're right about this. I originally thought tha
by ajxs 2y ago
> And if it hadn't been cut down enough it would have cannibalised sales of the more expensive synth.
I think you're right about this. I originally thought that maybe removing velocity sensitivity would have been enough, but lots of people would probably have been happy living without it.
> It's maybe more accurate to think of it as the prototype for the much cheaper budget 4-ops that Yamaha flooded the market with, after the DX7-tier was saturated.
I'd genuinely love to know what was going on inside Yamaha after the success of the DX7. There's a lot of information available about the development of the DX7, but I can't find much about what happened after. I'm not sure why there were so many of the 2nd generation 4-operator FM synths: DX21, DX100, DX27, FB01, TX81Z, V50, TQ5, and a bunch of other variants of these. Of these, only the TX81Z has really achieved the same kind of 'iconic' status as the DX7.
- aa-jv 2y agoThe answer is: music schools. We don't see this in the west so much, but Yamaha run the worlds largest networks of music schools, predominantly in Asia. The DX21, DX100, DX27, FB01, TX81Z .. product range .. is designed to cover the following use cases: music schools, karaoke bars, normal bars, and hobbyist musicians. In fact, Yamaha's biggest FM-based products (in terms of sales generated) is the karaoke market, where the more 'sophisticated' synths would be used by karaoke artists to create the MIDI files that then get shipped off to be 'played back' on the karoake-friendly devices, such as TG-series.