mojkarma wrote:There are 12 SRX expansions and 6 SN expansions and you get...what... 4 slots for 18 packages????????????...4 slots in 2012???
Come on Roland.
As I basically posted elsewhere...
Sure, it would be nice to be able to load all 18 at once. But let's say that the memory or other resources to support each virtual slot adds, oh, $50 to the retail price, but they don't want to hear complaints that they have 18 sound banks that can be loaded into only 4 slots. What choices would they have? They could offer only 4 sets of sound banks instead of 18, problem solved, but obviously we'd be getting a less capable unit. Or they could build in the necessary processing/memory/whatever to support 14 more simultaneous sound banks, raising the retail price of the unit by $700. But that raises the price for everyone, even if they are only interested in a handful of the expansions, and the higher price point would mean fewer people would buy it.
I'm not saying that Roland doesn't make some pretty unfathomable design decisions, but I don't think this is one of them, unless you assume they could just as easily have made all 18 sound sets simultaneously available at no increase in cost... but there is no reason to believe that's the case. From an engineering perspective, it seems like it would be simpler to just have it all available as you suggest than to have to build in a way to swap sounds in and out for no reason, so I think it's a pretty safe bet that doing it this way was cheaper.
mojkarma wrote:The srx cards contain just samples. They are 64 Mb each, but in a compressed form. So, let's say there is about 32 Mb of physical data per SRX card. For 12 SRX expansions that is about 400 Mb of Rom. Roland couldn't find a way to put 400 Mb sample data onto one chip (or slot) and make it available at once in 2012?
You're assuming a lot of compression, and still haven't allowed for the amount of ROM needed for the 6 other (SRX) packages or the 4-slot enhanced GM2 package. Even 400 mb of extra ROM wouldn't cost nothing to add, and for everything I listed, it could easily be double or triple that, if not more.
mojkarma wrote:Polyphony:
128 voices. Take a stereo srx patch with an additional tone/layer (the srx has up to 4 layers/tones per patch) and you are at 32 voices for one part. Now, play a piano over it.
I'm not sure how polyphony is handled in this architecture. But as for whether even your pretty-bad-case scenario is unworkable, I don't think Roland has ever made an SRX box that handled more than 128 voices, and people seemed to find them pretty usable. But for less than the price if a Jupiter 80, you could buy two of these boxes, and have 256 polyphony and simultaneous access to 8 expansion banks.
mojkarma wrote:Effects:
we are back at ONE FX per part if I read the specs correctly. So, we can again start to discuss how to create a organ with rotary and overdrive...
Yup, that sounds like a problem. Luckily it has the separate outs, so you can send the Organ patch out to a Neo Ventilator, and have a better rotary/overdrive effect than any Roland anyway.