Yamaha and Stanford University Announce Software Version of the VL Physical Modeling Synthesizers
November 23, 1997
Yamaha in conjunction with Stanford University, one of the Worlds
foremost education establishments, last week announced the most
important leap forward in desktop music since the invention of the sound
card. The system which will be known as Sondius XG, moves Yamaha into a new
era of software synthesis development, using the already World beating SYXG50 software XG engine and now
combining this with the already legendary SVA physical modeling
techniques used by Yamaha's ground breaking VL1/VL7 and VL70m tone
generators.
Already running on Pentium II and Pentium Pro systems here at Yamaha's
R&D, the aim is to release the commercial version of this staggering
technology within the next few months.
Playing back at full bandwidth 44.1k/16bit, the Sondius XG system
utilizes the most current state of the art technology available today.
The SOFTVL upgrade itself in size totals less than 1MB , making it a
perfect system for the net.
Yamaha has taken the decision that NO trial version of this will be
made available, however many audio demos in WAV file format will be
placed on Yamaha's site (www.yamaha.co.uk) over the coming months.
The system in technical terms is identical to the VL70m, being that it
has both VL-XG and VOICE mode operations, making it also fully
programmable using Yamaha's Visual, Analog and Expert editors (The
latter 2 would currently require a Macintosh for editing).
A copy of the original press release by SONDIUS, can be seen at www.sondius.com.
The system in its entirety takes the exiting SYXG50 engine and adds 256
preset VL voices conforming to the VL-XG spec of the VL70m, and also
combines the Voice mode programmability and parameters of the VL70m
also. A full overview of this can be found on the VL70m FAQ page, along
with some of the editing software.
The current system requires a P233 AMDK6 or Pentium 2 processor for
maximum playback with the SYXG50 engine in parallel. SOFT VL on its own
requires a P166 or higher. As time goes on the code will be further
optimized and we expect to have the average CPU overhead down to a much
lower level than this by time of release. The system currently will not
run on the CYRIX 686 P200+ or P166+ processors due to the floating
point anomaly with S-YXG50. For more information, visit their web site at www.yamaha.com. | 
