Synths

If one wants extreme accuracy and is willing to get out of the MIDI
environment, the synthesizers made by David Rayna remain very interesting.
I drive my double-precision Rayna synth-in-a-box through the parallel port
of my old Atari ST, and get 20 voice polyphony in frequency units of
.0000044139 Herz (the level of accuracy depends upon the number of voices).
I happen only to use sine waves, which the Rayna produces beautifully
(unlike any of the commercial products which are also so noisy that I am
hesitant to describe what I hear as _in tune_ or not); for those interested
in more complex waveforms, Rayna has a wave table send up so that relative
amplitudes of 16 partials selected from the first 64 can be fixed. For the
very nostalgic, Rayna has also made a modular synthesizer emulator program
for his synthesizer, where patches can be drawn on the screen to simulate
the cables we used in the good old days. I control the synth. either
through software sequences or through assignment of computer keys which are
played in realtime, but it would probably not be difficult at all to assign
midi keyboard commands to the Rayna, although they are significantly slower
than the Rayna.

I do not know about the present availability of Rayna�s products, but the
machines seem to appear for sale regularly among the new music community.
If anyone is seriously interested, I have some possible contacts.

Daniel Wolf

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