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Anyone know how many simultaneous voices (notes of polyphony) are available in the Ketron SD2?
The 384 voices in the spec is number of instrument patches, I'm pretty sure (3 banks of 128 = 384).
Roland still refers to notes of polyphony as voices, as in the SD-50, which is 128 voice.
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Can't find anything in the .pdf manual that mentions the actual polyphony (did a search just now for "poly" and found only one entry for "poly" command, but that's not the polyphony thing.
That said, I have never run out of notes with the SD2. Consider that there are TWO 16 ch. MIDI synths inside the little beast that are both able to handle the full patch listing, for one thing. Most folks never use the second 16 channels to yield the full 32 -- and if you ever did, you'd find out why, it requires special programming to access the second tier and besides that, musicality doesn't mean "more patches" the greater majority of he time, if you follow my drift.
--Mac
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Sorry Megafiddle, did a search of Ketron sites, review sites and manuals, I can find no specs that list the SD2 polyphony. Lots of really good reviews though.
Win11, Intel i7 7700K 4.2Ghz, 32Gb RAM, 2x1Tb HD, 500Gb NVMe, BIAB/RB 2026, MOTU 828MK3 audio, MOTU Midi Express, Yamaha Montage 7, DX7II, TX802, Motif XS Rack, Roland Fantom XR Rack, Oberheim Matrix 1000, VoiceLive3 Extreme, Kontakt 6, SampleTank 4.3
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Thanks.
Looking around some more, I found a review at B&H photo. They clain that Ketron says there are 32 voices available, but only 16 for stereo sounds. Doesn't mention if this is published somewhere, or was in a correspondance with Ketron.
Also, does the SD2 sound like the demos at the Ketron site? It only says they are from the SD series.
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32 Voices, in this case, does not mean polyphony.
It is a reference to what I said earlier in this thread, that the SD2 has the capability of playing 32 different MIDI channels simultaneously, by placing them in two banks of 16 as separate MIDi synths.
So they mean acual Voices (Patches) and not the number of indiviual notes that it can play at one time.
Again, I've never run out of polyphony with my SD2 and that's only using the one 16 Voice bank that's easily available.
--Mac
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You're probably right about it being number of voices, as Ketron uses the term. No source of the information was given in the review.
As a practical matter, it would seem to have enough, whatever the amount, as you haven't had any problems.
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And I've done a few full orchestrations that surely gave it h e l l...
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MountainSide -
Thanks for looking.
The reviews and demos got me real interested in the SD2 as it seems to be able to do the acoustic sounds better than the SD-50.
The SD-50 seems more like the old Roland JV-1060 and both are excellent for the type of sounds they do best. The SD2 seems to fill in a gap that's missing in those two Rolands.
Mac -
Thanks, good to know.
I plan to use the JV-1060 for melody parts and all the miscellaneous instruments that show up here and there in a song. So the SD2 would only have to handle drums, bass, piano, and guitar.
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