Korg DW-8000: Owned from July 2000-June 2002. Bought for $250, sold for $200.
The DW-8000 is a large 80's synthesizer with 8 voices, digital oscillators and analog filters. It is somewhat comparable to the Roland JX series, and sort of a step up from the Poly 800, but missing a few of the features that made the Poly 800 special. It's in a rather flimsy plastic case (bottom is metal) and has a really awful clunky loud 61-key velocity and aftertouch sensitive keyboard (though the key action is very quick- after a while it's not so bad). The velocity response is pretty good but the aftertouch response takes way too much pressure to activate (there are trimpots inside to adjust but I never bothered). On the back it has midi in/out/thru, stereo outputs, foot pedal inputs for program advance, sustain, and portamento (on/off control) and tape dump ins and outs (sysex is supported to but you need to send a dump request as there's no dump command from the keyboard). There's a joystick for pitch bend/modulation, an arpeggiator, buttons for programming, 3 2-digit LED displays (rather small and dim compared to the Poly 800) and a parameter chart. Overall it's not very pretty but it's got this 80's look that I found almost nice.
The voice architecture is simple but it has all the necessary components. There are two oscillators per voice which can be set to 16', 8', or 4'. Not a very wide range but it covers the most useful parts. There are 16 waveforms to choose from: saw, square, acoustic piano, electric piano, hard electric piano, clavi, organ, brass, saxophone, violin, acoustic guitar, distorted guitar, electric bass, digital bass, bell, and sine. Some of them sound good, others are pretty useless, and most of the sampled waves don't really sound like their names. There's a simple auto-bend style pitch envelope that can be routed to either or both oscillators. Oscillator 2 can be transposed to be a fifth, a fourth, a third, or a minor third above oscillator 1, and can be detuned. There's the filter, which can self-oscillate, and it has the usual env mod and key tracking controls. The VCF and VCA have separate 6-stage envelopes (Attack, Decay, Break Point, Slope, Sustain, Release) that are fairly fast. Each one has adjustable velocity sensitivity. Then there's a lovely digital delay, similar to the Poly 800 one except that most of the parameters can be adjusted in realtime, and there's no EQ. It has delay time, feedback, mod amount, mod rate, and wet out controls. There's a delayed LFO with triangle, square, rising saw, and falling saw waveforms that can modulate the DCOs (both together) or VCF. The LFO can go fairly fast. Aftertouch can be routed to the cutoff and/or volume but the response is pretty bad so I never used it. The joystick can be set to modulate the pitch and/or filter cutoff when moved to the side, and filter/pitch LFO modulation when moved up or down. There's portamento too. There's a limited but nice arpeggiator that can be set to 1 octave, 2 octaves, or 6 octaves, and can be switched between up and up/down (I think). It supposedly syncs to midi but I never got that to work. One nice feature is its "hold" mode which is useful for running an arpeggiated sequence while adjusting the parameters. It doesn't send midi out, unfortunately. There are 4 voice assignment modes- poly 1 which acts like a normal polysynth, poly2 which uses the same voice for successive notes, for use with portamento. Unison 1 and 2 stack and detune all the voices to make a really huge sound, I think the difference is that unison 2 uses legato triggering.
The sound is very nice, if you like dark pad sounds. The synth doesn't have a lot of high end at all- I think partly because of the lo-fi oscillators and partly because of the lo-fi delay. Oscillators sound pretty good. They alias a little bit when using pitch bend but not badly. The filter is amazing - it's the same chip as the Poly 800 but in a one-per-voice arrangement which sounds even better. It has a very nice acidy (but not roland style) sound. The delay is great too, it fits the character of the synth perfectly. It has a very dark and lush sound. Overall the synth sounds excellent, but ultimately it didn't fit into my studio because it's monotimbral and doesn't have a lot of fancy modulation routings. At the time I didn't have the space for it so I sold it.
Internally there are 3 main boards- the digital board, the analog board, and the delay board. The digital board has the CPU circuits and the oscillators. The CPU is a Hitachi HD63B03X. The "DWGS" oscillator system is made up of 8-bit waveforms (multisampled by the octave as far as I can tell) stored in 4 256Kbit ROM chips, with two custom chips to generate the audio signals from there. The DAC is a DAC08, and the output of that is split into 16 separate signals by a demultiplexer. There's another 8-bit DAC, an HA17008, for CVs. From there it goes through NJM2069AD voltage controlled mixer / filter / amplifier chips (which have unusued 2-pole filter outputs) on the analog board, then to the delay board, and out. The delay is a 12-bit companded delay with a VCO-based clock and 16KB of RAM (If I'm correct with my math, this means that at maximum delay time, the delay sample rate is only 10667 Hz!). A custom chip, the 65010CW-113, controls everything. Because it's done with primitive hardware rather than DSP chips, the feedback path is mixed in with the input and goes back through the anti-aliasing filter again. This gives it a nice analog-ish sound which really complements the sound of the synth. One channel of the delay is inverted for output which gives a simple but nice pseudo-stereo sound.
The DW-8000 is a very reliable synth in my experience but it does have a few problem areas, mainly the buttons and an occasional stuck note. The buttons over time, as on many synths, get full of dust and junk and tend to bounce or mis-trigger. This is a pretty minor annoyance most of the time but it can really ruin things when saving patches. Stuck notes are caused by malfunctioning keyboard contacts: There are two sets of contacts, one closed when the key is up and the other closed when the key is down. When a key is pressed down it opens the first contact then closes the second, and the amount of time between the two events is measured and used for velocity information. The problem is that for a note off to be sensed it has to touch the first contact again. Sometimes it doesn't quite happen for whatever reason, and the result is a stuck note. There have been keyboard hardware and OS revisions to stop this but it's still a minor problem. Luckily it doesn't happen often.
Overall it's a very nice sounding synth. Not terribly versitile and it's missing a lot of features that make other synths special, but the warmth makes up for it. It makes a good alternative to Juno-style synths, especially for the price.
There was an additional board that could be installed, called the Angel City Turbo DW board, which added features like a random LFO wave, more patch storage, and bitimbral capabilities. But it's long out of production and I don't really know much about it.
Additional tricks:
There are several button combinations that can be used when turning the synth on:
1 and 2 - displays OS version and turns on write protect
5 and 6 - reference voltage adjustment mode
7 and 8 - tuning mode
5 and 8 - clear RAM
And one interesting thing I've found about the DW-8000 is that sysex data can be used to put the parameters outside of their intended values. For the most part the effects aren't very interesting: the pitch bend range can reach several octaves, the oscillators can be transposed to extreme values, but that's about it for most parameters. The delay settings is where it gets interesting: set the coarse time parameter to 8 or above (normally it goes from 0-7) and many horrible distorted Merzbow-style sounds can come out. There is a lot of room for experimenting here.
sounds:
DW-8000-1- demo made using the arpeggiator, while tweaking sound parameters. There's also another one here
links:
The service manual can be found here: AUTOTESTS CALIBRATION PROCEDURE
and there's a patch editor here: dw8000
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