Casio VZ-10M- owned from May 2002 to present, bought for $177 (paid a bit too much but oh well- not bad considering it's in great condition with the manual)
This was Casio's last and most advanced attempt at a professional synthesizer. It's a very nice looking 2-space rack module, the rack version of the VZ-1. I suppose it was Casio's answer to the Yamaha TX802. It uses iPD, which stands for interactive phase distortion synthesis. Really it's a variation on FM synthesis (which actually works by phase modulation).
For each of the 16 voices, there are 8 oscillators (modules) organized into pairs (lines). In each line, the two oscillators can be set to mix, ring modulation, or phase modulation. Unfortunately, when phase modulation is selected, the modulator-carrier frequency ratio fixed to 2:1. Also, every line except the first can have its second oscillator phase modulated by the output of the previous line. It's not really that versitile for just FM synthesis- It takes 4 oscillators to do what a Yamaha could do with 2 if you want arbitrary frequency ratios. Plus there's no feedback, etc. (though a similar sound can be obtained by using a saw wave as a modulator and a sine wave as a carrier for phase modulation). But the other features give it some very interesting possibilities that go beyond what Yamaha synths are capable of. And at least there's a nice graphical representation of what's being edited.
Each oscillator has a selection of 8 waveforms- sine, 5 saw waves (varying in harmonic content), and 2 noise waves (white noise and white noise with fundamental). There is a very nice tuning page where the pitch can be set to 1/64 to 64 (corresponding to harmonic series), or by octaves, semitones, and fine tune (from 0 to 64- not in cents). There's also a fixed frequency mode with two ranges, the lowest can go very low. Fixed frequency oscillators aren't affected by any pitch modulation. Overall, the tuning possibilities are much better than the ones on a DX7.
Then there's an 8-stage pitch envelope. The envelopes have rate/level parameters for each step, like the DX7, and unfortunately this means that it's hard to make stepped envelopes. The part that's different from the DX7 is that any stage (or none) can be set as the sustain stage, and any stage after the sustain can be set as the endpoint. This isn't really as cool as the Ensoniq EPS envelopes, which use times and rates, can be set to loop, and have separate curves for high and low velocity, but they're still very nice compared to what's available on other synths. There's a depth parameter, from 0 to 63, and a range setting- wide or narrow. Wide is very wide, it's possibile to get pitch sweeps which go from sub-bass to aliasing squeals. There's also a pitch envelope key follow curve, which controls the level over the key range. There are 6 variable keyboard positions and 6 associated values to control the level. After that, there's a pitch envelope velocity control. There are 8 velocity curves to choose from, linear, exponential, logarithmic, inverse linear, 2-level, etc.
The vibrato LFO is next, with triangle, square, saw up, and saw down waveforms. There are typical depth, rate, and delay parameters, plus a "multi" setting which generates independent LFOs for each note. One unusual and welcome feature is that the LFO rate can be adjusted from a mod wheel, pedal, or aftertouch. The LFO doesn't go all that fast and it has a maximum depth of one octave. After that there's an octave setting to transpose the whole patch- up to 2 octaves up or down.
The amplitude envelope works the same way as the pitch envelope, only it's not bipolar. The envelope depth parameter effectively controls the overall oscillator amplitude. Then there's a key follow level, same as the pitch envelope one. This can be set independently for each oscillator, which opens up a lot of very interesting possibilities. There's a velocity level parameter, which can use any curve. Again this is for each oscillator. Then there's a parameter which controls the amplitude modulation amount for each oscillator. This is linked to the tremolo LFO (which works exactly like the vibrato one) and the mod wheels, foot pedal, aftertouch, whichever is set to modulate "env bias".
There's another key follow curve which controls envelope speed- unfortunately it's global- it works for all envelopes equally, I think the pitch envelope too. This can be a convenient way to adjust global envelope speed without editing all 8 envelopes individually. Also, the velocity can control envelope rates. This isn't limited to simply modulating attack times like it is in the Ensoniq gear. It can modulate each stage of the all of the envelopes independently! The only catch is that all of the envelope stages which are modulated (selected by E characters for "enable") share the same velocity sensitivity and curve. Still, this means that the attack of one and the decay of another can be shortened at higher velocity, etc. There are a *lot* of possibilities here.
All of the above settings describe "menu 1", which is patch data. "menu 2" is global data and controls mono mode, portamento, pitch wheel depth (which is up to +/- 4 octaves!), and destinations for the mod wheels, pedal, aftertouch, etc. Definately a pain that this data isn't stored for each patch, seems they were emulating the DX7 a bit too closely. "menu 3" controls other data, midi modes, global transposition (very fine control here), patch dumps, memory protect, and other boring stuff.
There are several play modes for all this patch data- normal mode, which simply plays the patch with the menu 2 data. Then combination mode, which which does splits/layers of up to 4 patches, each with its own menu 2 data (including neat stuff like delay and detune for each layer, tremolo, vibrato, and velocity inversion, etc.). These ensembles can be stored as operation memories (so there is a way to store menu 2 data for each patch, it's just a pain to do it). Finally, there's multi-channel mode, where there are 8 independent multitimbral channels can have their own patch assignments and menu 2 data, plus tuning, etc. but none of the velocity, vibrato, or tremolo inversion that's found in the combination mode. Parts 1-4 come out the left output, and 5-8 come out the right one, corresponding to the 2 LSI chips which make the sounds. There's no dynamic voice allocation, so the number of voices of each part can be set, with a maximum of 8 for each set of parts. Unfortunately, multitimbral setups can't be saved.
It's a pain to program, even with the big 64x96 pixel LCD screen. The problem is that there are lots of menus and parameters, and they have to be scrolled through one-by-one. The least they could have done was let the 16 module select keys also correspond to menu selections.
Inside, I was surprised to find that it uses single-sided circuit boards. The CPU is a Hitachi �PD78C14 16-bit processor, clocked at 15MHz. There are 2 32K ROM chips, one containing preset data and the other containing the operating system, and 2 32K RAM chips, one for patch data (stores 64 patches and 64 operation memories) and one for system memory. Additionally there's a card slot for more patches (64K ROM or 32K RAM). The sound is generated on 2 custom LSI chips (HD62013) which handle 8 voices each. Each LSI is clocked at 20MHz and has a small 8K RAM chip for calculations. The DAC is a PCM54.
The sound is nice, clear and detailed. The DAC is muted when no voices are playing, resulting in a slightly audible drop in noise- really only noticeable when using it in isolation, with headphones. There is a small amount of quantization noise as well (I guess the DAC doesn't have any oversampling or interpolation). Aliasing is much more unpleasant than the older Yamaha FM hardware because of the higher sampling rate. Sounds have to have ear-shredding high end before they will alias noticeably.
As with most complex synthesizers, the quality of the sounds depends more than anything on the programming skill going into it. It won't instantly sound good, but the sounds it can make are very rewarding. Thanks to the saw waves, one of the things it can do much better than a DX7 is sounds with a full range of harmonics. A DX7 can't produce proper square or saw waves- at low modulation levels, there are only low harmonics, and at higher levels, there are mostly higher harmonics, without much of a fundamental frequency (well, actually it can produce saw waves with feedback, but it's of limited usefulness when it's only available on one operator). So it can be hard to get really "rich" sounds. The VZ series has saw waves which can overcome this limitation- and using phase modulation, it's very easy to make square waves too. With a bit more work, it can even do real pulsewidth modulation. The only problem here is that there isn't really a way to control the brightness of these waves unless they're used as modulators for phase modulation. So it's not analog territory, but it's a step closer than a DX7. Also, one gripe I have is that the phases of the oscillators reset for each note. Unlike the DX7, there's no "sync" parameter. This means that the 8 saw wave pad sound that should sound really nice instead makes an annoying flangey sound. But ring modulation opens up a lot of new possibilities...
Overall it's a very nice synth, if you can stomach the user interface (I can tolerate it easily but apparently most people find it awful). It seems like there are a lot of features that won't get used much (8 velocity curves, complex key follow curves, etc.) but it's nice to know they're there, and I do like the fact that some of the parameters can have extreme values that wouldn't be found in a lot of synths (pitch envelope modulation depth, for example).
Alternatives to the VZ-10M include the VZ-1 (same thing but with a nice 5-octave keyboard and 2 assignable mod wheels) and VZ-8M (8 voices, and a 2x16 display, but there's better control over panning- it can even be modulated like in the ESQ-M).
pictures:
sounds: a demo mp3 can be found here
links:
The VZ-1 service manual, and a patch editor are available here: The Easy-VeeZee guide to Casio VZ synthesizers
There's a decent Casio CZ/VZ list at Yahoogroups that I'm on: Yahoo!Groups: CZsynth
And this page has some good info: Casio CZ Userpage. Sounds, Manuals for CZ, FZ, RZ, VZ
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