[A6] re :replace my A6

[cgould11 at tampabay.rr.com]

> Tim Kleinert wrote:
> "If it would be _that_ bad, Alesis surely wouldn't
> "be selling them anymore, because the warranty 
> "repair costs would cut into the profits
> considerably"
> this indeed could become a serious problem when 
> more people would test and find out if their 
> oscillators are above , let's say a range of 
> +/- 3 cents . or their keyboardtracking beyond 
> +/-1 cent.

No, not really. 

Most people use ears, not test meters, to judge 
sound quality. In fact, loose tolerance to a 
certain point makes an instrument sound more alive 
so this may have been intentional. :)

If there was really serious problems with new
keyboards, there would be much weblog thrashing
This is not happening. The A6 gets fairly good 
marks these days. The only dings tend to come with
MIDI syncing, which I know is fairly poor. 
Otherwise, the reviews these days are very positive
now that the bedroom musicians mostly are focusing
on pirated plugins rather than whining about how 
they can't buy stuff. 

I thought that I could probably tell the difference
between .75Hz of notes. But that was speculation. I
just did a test using the PC speaker and a quick
VB API code. At 440Hz, it took about 1.75Hz (7 
cents) before I noticed *marginal* differences in 
tuning. So a tad more than I thought. I can write
a quick VB app to show this concept if you want. :P

So I did some web searchin'. According to this: http://www.physics.mcgill.ca/~guymoore/ph224/lecture5/
the difference in Hz typically has to be at least 
half a percent before the ear can tell a tonal 
difference. That's about 9 cents at 440Hz. 
I'm a little tighter, it seems, but not by much. 
Since my pitch IDing is pretty good (perfect by 
most standards :) ) most people will probably 
have a lot looser interpretation.

[I'm also assuming a reference of 440. The A6 
tolerance would most likely slide more on Hz lines 
and not cents. Since pitch identification gets 
useless at the very low and very high end of the 
spectrum it is useless to say that the A6 has a 
+/- 3 cent difference at 10,000Hz when the reality 
is this could imply really tight tuning in normal 
musical Hertz ranges.]

So fine. Sorry, I hate to sound pissy, but you've 
been harping on this too much :P, and I'm about to 
the point where I'm going "DUDE! This is an 
analog synth! You *buy* these expensive monsters 
for the sloppy tuning  because it *sounds better!*
You have programmers working round the clock, 
trying to emulate sloppy tuning using odd C++ 
function so that DSP synths can actually sound 
1/4 like the A6 does, and you have the real thing,
and your Andromeda can stand up the the JP8000s of
the world and blow the !@#$ away its "super saw" 
so-called phat with one farkin' oscillator,
and you complain about the "feature" that allows it
to do this?"

Well, that's one person's opinion. :P