From sholcom1@utk.edu Sat May 18 07:13:23 2002
Subject:Re: Inside the Nord Electro

I'm stepping into water here that may be over my head, but my understanding
is that the Nord and nearly all the other newer clones don't use samples,
but instead use digital modeling to produce the sound.

Therefore the same amount of memory is not needed, but the CPU (or whatever
it is in a dedicated sound module) must be far more powerful than in, for
example, my Emu Proformance piano module made in 1990.

Steve H


> This is equivalent to 32MB of flash ram. With six sounds, that
> leaves only about 5.3 MB of RAM per sound! (Maybe less, depending on
> OS size, etc.) Pretty amazing they can get such a good sound with
> such little memory. Of course, I wouldn't be surprised if the
> samples were compressed in some way (mp3?) to allow more to fit.
>
> If 5.3MB can hold about 5 minutes of audio (assuming mp3
> compression), then that means each key of a 73 key sound could be
> recorded for 4 seconds. If we assume that we don't need to sample
> each note, only 1 in 4, that means we can now have up to four
> samples for each four-note range, and vary them from soft to loud. I
> wonder if this is what the Electro does?
>
> Of course, the Organ simulation is comparatively tiny... the whole
> OS is only around 100 KB.
>
> Thoughts? Comments?
>
> Alexander