Tag Archives: wave ROM

Montage tidbits

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Martin Harris. Now, there’s a person who loves his job!

Even though the camera work is a little shaky, I recommend the Montage demonstration by Martin Harris of Yamaha.

Martin’s demo concentrates on acoustic and electric pianos, section and solo strings, brass, Irish whistle and pads — all from a cinematic perspective. Not much EDM here.

I like Martin’s demonstrations because he adds information about sample and voice development. Even though he calls it a “whistle stop tour,” it’s more like a tour of the world. Yamaha have traveled the world to sample the best instruments and players. Here are a few examples as mentioned by Martin:

  • Section and solo strings: Seattle
  • Brass: Los Angeles (L.A. horns)
  • Classical men’s choir: Germany
  • Classical boy’s choir: Estonia
  • Flamenco guitar: Madrid
  • Brazilian percussion: Sao Paulo
  • Turkish percussion: Istanbul
  • Iranian percussion: Tehran
  • Middle Eastern percussion: Bahrain
  • Irish whistle: Ireland

Before people complain about the cost of a top-of-the-line keyboard like the Montage or Tyros, they really should take the cost and time of sampling and voice development into account!

The Montage CFX grand piano is all new sampling. Martin stated the compressed total waveform size as 300 Mbytes, approaching 1 GBytes uncompressed. At demo time (April 2016), the Montage CFX was the biggest sampled piano in the Yamaha line. The Rhodes and Wurlitzer electric pianos are also new sampling.

Guitars also got an update. Martin and Gibson steel guitars were sampled. The sampled Telecaster is a $60,000, 1957 vintage Tele. Martin mention how, in the past, Yamaha removed the dirt from samples. Today they leave in some of the idiosynracies, charm and character.

If you enjoyed Martin’s demo, here are a few blog posts to check out. Last April, I made a list of new waveforms in the Montage vs. the Motif XF. I also wrote a thought piece about waveform memory size and sample development.

New sound development, including sampling, is a continual, on-going process at Yamaha. In an era when waveform memory is relatively big and inexpensive, sound developers need to work overtime in order to fill available memory space. I think the limiting factor now is the amount of time and human resources available to produce new samples and to program new expressive voices.

Copyright © 2017 Paul J. Drongowski

PSR-S770 and S970 internal architecture

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Yamaha just recently introduced the new PSR-S770 and PSR-S970 arranger workstations. As usual, I’m always anxious to dive into the service manual and see what’s up.

First, I’d like to thank Uli and capriz68 on the PSR Tutorial Forum for their help. Uli made a very nice table from my ramblings, so be sure to check it out there.

Without further introduction, here is a table comparing previous generation models (PSR-S750 and PSR-S950) against the new models.

                    PSR-S750  PSR-S950   PSR-S770  PSR-S970
                    --------  ---------  --------  ---------
Main CPU            SWX08     SH7731     SH7731    SH7731
Clock rate (MHz)    135.4752  256        320       320
Tone generator      SWP51L    SWP51L     SWP70     SWP70
Ext clock (MHz)     11.2896   11.2896    22.5792   22.5792
DSP SDRAM (MBytes)  8         8          8         8
DSP RCLK (MHz)      45.1584   45.1584    95.9616   95.9616
Mic ADC                       AK5381     PCM1803   AK5357
AUX IN ADC          AK5357    AK5381     AK5357    AK5381
DAC                 AK4396    AK4396     AK4396    AK4396
Digital amp         YDA164C   2*YDA164C  YDA164C   2*YDA164C
Wave ROM (MBytes)   256       256        512       2048
Wave SDRAM          N/A       N/A        32MBytes  32MBytes
SSP2 chip           No        Yes        No        No

The main CPU remains a Renasas SH4AL-DSP CPU. The clock speed is increased from 256MHz to the 320MHz, which is just shy of the rated maximum for the SH7731.

Wave memory is increased from 256MBytes (S950) to 512MBytes (S770) and 2GBytes (S970). Part of the S770 and S970 wave memory is reserved for expansion pack voices: 160 MBytes (S770) and 512 MBytes (S950). How Yamaha uses the rest of the memory is up to Yamaha. However, we are now in an era when we cannot compare products solely on the basis of physical wave memory size. Our ears and performance experience are more important than mere byte counts!

The S970 has two NAND flash memory devices labelled “audio style.” The devices are:

    4Gbit NAND flash = 512MBytes
    2GBit NAND flash = 256MBytes
                       ---------
    Total audio style  768MBytes

Yamaha specifies memory size in bits, so one must be careful to convert during analysis. The PSR-S950 has a NAND flash device labelled “Program ROM,” which presumably served the same purpose as well as holding the operating system image that is loaded at boot time. The S950 device capacity is 512MBytes (4Gbits). The S970 reserves 128MBytes for audio style expansion.

The upper mid-range model, i.e., the S970, is biamplified with two digital power amps. The older S950 is also biamplified. Not much change here.

The big news is that Yamaha have a new tone generator integrated circuit (IC), the SWP70. The SWP70 uses the serialized wave memory interface that I described in an earlier post. The SWP70 appears to operate at twice the speed of the older SWP51L. The SWP70 has implications for other future products, so I will analyze it in a separate post.

With respect to the PSR-S970, however, there is another evolutionary step. With the appearance of the new SWP70, there is also the disappearance of the SSP2 IC. The introduction of the SSP2 IC coincided with the introduction of Vocal Harmony 2 in both the Tyros line and the PSR-S950. It is reasonable to infer, then, that vocal harmony is implemented on board SSP2. With the PSR-S970, there are two possibilites.

  1. Vocal harmony is assigned to the now faster main CPU, or
  2. SSP2 functionality is integrated into the new SWP70.

The SWP70 is beefed up in other ways including a new wave working memory.

The future looks interesting as always!

Here are links to my articles on other members of the PSR and Tyros product families:
What’s inside of a Yamaha arranger?
A follow-up on the Yamaha SWP51
Yamaha arranger product family

All site content is Copyright © Paul J. Drongowski unless otherwise noted.

Arranger memory: One more time!

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OK, OK, not everyone reads service manuals and schematics for their keyboard. However, I do get a little frustrated when posters compare apples to oranges, and make statements like “I can buy 1GByte for $1 (USD), so why is Yamaha so stingy with wave memory?”

Here is some information from the S750/S950 and Tyros5 service manuals and product data sheets. Please keep in mind that there are many different kinds of memory in an arranger. I’m going to focus on tone generation because that is the most relevant to wave memory size.

Both the S750/S950 and Tyros5 use proprietary Yamaha tone generator integrated circuits designated “SWP51L”. The S750/S950 designs use one SWP51L and the Tyros5 has two SWP51L chips. Each SWP51L has two dedicated memory ports (called “HIGH” and “LOW”) where each port consists of an address bus and a 16-bit parallel data bus.

In the S750/S950, each port is connected to a WAVE ROM:

    S750 WAVE ROM-L 1Gbit IC308   JS28F00AM29EWLA
    S750 WAVE ROM-H 1Gbit IC302   JS28F00AM29EWLA

That’s 128MBytes per device for a total of 256MBytes (2 times 128MBytes).

The Tyros5 microarchitecture is a little more complicated — the memory devices are shared between two SWP51Ls via separate shared address and data busses. There are six WAVE ROM integrated circuits:

    Tyros5 WAVE ROM-L0 1Gbit IC702   S29GL01GS10TFI020
    Tyros5 WAVE ROM-H0 1Gbit IC716   S29GL01GS10TFI020
    Tyros5 WAVE ROM-L1 1Gbit IC703   S29GL01GS10TFI020
    Tyros5 WAVE ROM-H1 1Gbit IC717   S29GL01GS10TFI020
    Tyros5 WAVE ROM-L2 1Gbit IC704   S29GL01GS10TFI020
    Tyros5 WAVE ROM-H2 1Gbit IC718   S29GL01GS10TFI020

That’s a total of 768MBytes (6 times 128MBytes).

Those cryptic names in the tables above identify the specific memory component. The components come from two vendors: Micro Technology and Spansion. Here are the gory details.

    Micron Technology JS28F00AM29EWLA  56-pin TSOP
        Parallel NOR Flash Embedded Memory
        Configurable width data bus (8- or 16-bits)
        Asynchronous random/page read
            Page access speed: 25ns
            Random access speed: 110ns
            Page size: 16 words or 32 bytes

    Spansion S29GL01GS10TFI020 56-bit TSOP

        GL-S MirrorBit Eclipse Flash Non-Volatile Memory
        S29GL01GS 1 Gbit (128 Mbyte)
        16-bit parallel data bus
        Asynchronous 32-byte page read
            Page access speed: 25ns
            Random access speed: 100ns
        Program and erase rates (i.e., write speed)
            Buffer Programming (512 bytes) 1.5 MB/s
            Sector Erase (128 kbytes) 477 kB/s

The read speed (25ns per 16-bit word in page mode) is much faster than write speed, and that’s OK in this application because the data is always read once it’s loaded/initialized. The SWP51L probably operates in page mode since the samples are accessed sequentially. Dunno ’bout you, but 25 nanoseconds per 16-bit word is darned fast. The access speed is MUCH higher than a typical USB flash drive.

Two 27-bit address busses and two 16-bit data busses are sent to/from the plug-in expansion board. These busses extend the two shared WAVE ROM busses. The expansion board needs to keep up with the high read rate.

Please note that the CPU does not get anywhere near the sample streams. That work is assigned to the SWP51Ls.

Hope this helps to clarify.

A dive into some old Roland gear

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I haven’t taken a deep dive into any gear lately and my ears need a break! So, here goes.

The Web is a wonderful source of distractions. After discovering the new Roland Sound Canvas app for iPad, I was searching for some information about the later model Sound Canvas modules and came across the Roland Service Notes for the XP-80 workstation, the XV-1010 module, and the SK-88Pro Sound Canvas. I still have these instruments in my sonic arsenal although they don’t see as much day-to-day use anymore. The orchestral sounds, in particular, hold their own today and I occasionally play the XP-60 at my church gig. Some of the sounds like the Voice expansion board (taken from Vocal Planet) are unique and stellar.

Roland have their “Service Notes” and Yamaha have their “Service Manuals.” To each his own name. However, keep these terms in mind when searching the Web for documentation on the innards.

As you might expect, there are similarities to Yamaha’s approach and some differences. These instruments are embedded computer systems for Pete’s sake — they just happen to make joyful noise. These instruments were developed in the late ’90s and early 2000s.

Roland — like Yamaha — drew from the Hitachi (now Renesas) processor families. The XP and XV use the more powerful SH-1 series CPUs while the SK uses the less powerful H8/510.

All of instruments have a custom tone generation chip. Roland’s naming convention for the tone generator ICs does not suggest how these chips fit into a family although the “XP” mnemonic is used throughout. The tone generators each have a dedicated RAM for effects processing similar to the Yamaha SWP51 series. The tone generators have a dedicated wave memory interface. The Yamaha SWP51 supports two 16-bit channels while the Roland tone generators have a single 16-bit data channel. I’m just know starting to appreciate how tone generation is a bandwidth-sensitive application and the single vs. double channel difference may be functionally significant. Certainly, the Yamaha approach requires many more pins, but it supports higher bandwidth. More polyphony? More voice elements? Hmmm.

Since these are older instruments, the wave memory size is not about to knock you out. However, this is an important reminder that wave memory size isn’t everything. Roland developed and programmed very good sound sets for these instruments. The wave memory may seem miniscule in the era of multi-gigabyte sample libraries, but it’s what hits the ears which matters the most.

Here are the details — straight, no chaser. Speaking of which, I’m knee deep in the development of a scat vocal voice for the PSR-S950. This project has taken a month so far and I’m only about 90% finished. Stay tuned.

Roland XP-80

Following is a list of the most relevant bits of sand in the Roland XP-80 workstation:

IC5     XP         Unidentified      Custom tone generator

IC12    SH CPU     HD6437034SC66F    Hitachi SH7034 Superh RISC engine
IC36    WAVEROM B  LHMN5PNA          4MByte WAVE ROM for tone generator
IC37    WAVEROM A  LHMN5PN9          4MByte WAVE ROM for tone generator
IC10    MASK ROM   TC5316200CF       MASK ROM on system bus (data+code)

IC17    SRAM       HM62864LFP-7SLZ   SRAM on CPU system bus
IC19    SRAM       HY6264ALJ-70TE2   DRAM for LCD controller
IC14,15 DRAM       LH64256BK-70      EFX DRAM for tone generator
IC21,22 DRAM       HM514800CJ-80     DRAM on CPU system bus

IC39,41 DAC        PCM69AU-1/T2      24-bit DAC

The SH7034 is a 32-bit RISC engine (SH-1 architecture) with peripheral interface logic integrated onto the chip. The SH7034 chip also has a 64KByte ROM/EPROM and a 4KByte RAM. The CPU has 32-bit datapaths, sixteen 32-bit general registers and a five stage pipeline. It has a multiply and accumulate (MAC) unit.

The XP tone generator (TG) is not explicitly identified in the parts list. It is merely labeled “XP” in the circuit schematic. The tone generator interface to the WAVE ROM has 23 address bits and is 16-bit data parallel. The WAVE ROMs provide data as 16-bit words. Each ROM has 21 address bits and the 16-bit data bus is shared between all ROMs. Each ROM is 4MBytes for 8MBytes total WAVE ROM. This checks with Roland marketing literature.

The Burr Brown PCM69AU is a dual 18-bit DAC capable of 16x oversampling. This part was also manufactured by Texas Instruments.

Roland XV-1010

The XV-1010 is a one expansion slot sound module in the JV/XV family. The XV-1010 has the basic XP sound set plus the “Session” expansion sounds — essentially a built-in SRJV expansion board. The XV-1010 does not have much of a user interface and not much is required in terms of processor power to support it.

Here is a table of the main ingredients in the XV-1010:

IC1    CPU            HD6437016F28
IC2    SRAM           TC551001CF-70L      RAM on CPU system bus
IC3    XP6            RA09-002            Custom tone generator
IC4    DRAM           MN414260DSJ-06T1    DRAM on CPU system bus
IC5    DRAM           MN414260DSJ-06T1    Tone generator effect DRAM
IC6    WAVE ROM A     LHMN0PVW            8MByte WAVE ROM
IC7    WAVE ROM B     LHMN0PU5            8MByte WAVE ROM
IC14   FLASH MEMORY   LH28F160S5T-L70     FLASH memory on CPU system bus
IC26   DAC            AK4324-VF-E2        DAC driven by tone generator

The Hitachi SH7016 is another member of the SH-1 RISC processor family. Peripheral interface logic is integrated onto the chip making it ideal for embedded applications (like a synthesizer). The CPU has 32-bit datapaths, sixteen 32-bit general registers, and a five stage pipeline. The CPU has a multiply-accumulate (MAC) unit. The SH7016 has 64 KBytes of mask ROM and 2 KBytes of RAM (when the 1KB cache is enabled).

The tone generator IC wave memory interface has 23 address bits and a 16-bit data bus. Each WAVE ROM has 22 address bits and they share the 16-bit data bus. The basic XP sound set is stored in an 8MByte ROM and the Session sound set is store in an 8MByte ROM for a total of 16MBytes of wave memory.

The EXP-B SLOT has 21 address bits and an 8-bit data bus. The narrow data bus is probably a legacy artifact from the earlier JV-series instruments.

The Asahi Kasei (AKM) AK4324 is a 1-bit, 128x oversampling stereo DAC with
a maximum 96KHz sample rate. It includes a 24-bit digital filter.

Roland SK-88Pro

The SK-88Pro is an SC-88 Sound Canvas built into a 3 octave MIDI controller with the Roland two-way pitch bend/modulation stick. The SK has two MIDI IN ports with 16 channels each. The controller is built like a tank and is almost as rugged as made-of-metal Roland workstations. I would not trade this thing for any of the toy-like controllers on the market today!

Here is a table listing the important integrated circuits:

IC1     CPU              HD6415108F          H8/510 microcontroller
IC3     XP               RA01-005            Custom tone generator
IC4     CUSTOM DSP       MB87837PF-G-BND     Unique to the Sound Canvas?

IC8     PROGRAM ROM      LH538U29            Main program and data
IC17    WAVE ROM         UPD23C32000AGX-314  4MByte WAVE memory
IC13    WAVE MASK ROM    LHMN0PNM AB         4MByte WAVE memory
IC15    WAVE MASK ROM    LHMN0PNN CD         4MByte WAVE memory
IC12    DSP RAM          NN514260J-60        256K x 16-bit word memory

IC50,51 DAC              UPD63200GS-E2       DAC for each channel

IC5     SUB CPU          M38881M2-152GP      Handles MIDI input/output
IC7     SUB PROG ROM     LH5S4H0B            Program and data ROM

The Hitachi H8/510 microcontroller family uses a 16-bit CPU core. The H8 has 16-bit datapaths, eight 16-bit general registers and a maximum speed of 10MHz. The H8/510 has integrated peripheral logic and is designed for embedded applications.

The SUB CPU handles MIDI input and output nothing more, nothing less. This is different than Yamaha’s SUB CPU which does heavy lifting.

The custom DSP IC communicates with the XP tone generator. The custom DSP has a dedicated 256K x 16-bit word DRAM. The tone generator has a dedicated 256K x 16-bit word DRAM for effects processing.

The XP tone generator has three WAVE ROM ICs: IC13, IC15 and IC17. The three WAVE ROMs have 21 address bits each and share a 16-bit data bus. The tone generator drives 22 address bits; the least signficiant bit, WA0, is not connected. Address bits WA[1:22] are sent to the WAVE ROMs. The high order bit, WA22, appears to function as a (ROM) chip select. This implies 12MByte of WAVE ROM total.

A follow-up on the Yamaha SWP51

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Here’s a follow-up on the Yamaha SWP51 tone generator.

Sound On Sound (SOS) mentioned that the SWP51 tone generator was first used in the Yamaha Motif XS family. The Motif XS has two SWP51 ICs with a master/slave relationship. Each SWP51 has 8MBytes of dedicated DSP SDRAM. The two SWP51s share wave ROM arranged in two banks (high and low) of 512Mbits each for a total physical capacity of 128MBytes. Each wave ROM device is a Spansion S29GL512N10TFI020 which is a 32M by 16-bit parallel NOR flash memory. (Yay, Spansion. I ate lunch in their cafeteria in Austin.)

SOS and others claim that the SWP51 performs sample compression. The Yamaha specifications state wave ROM capacity at “355MBytes when converted to 16-bit linear format,” meaning uncompressed size. The waveforms are compressed in order to fit into 128MBytes of physical memory.

There is only one thing that we can conclude for sure. The PSR-S750 and PSR-950 have twice the physical wave ROM space as the Motif XS and MOX (256MBytes vs. 128MBytes).

The Motif XS with two SWP51s has 128 voice polyphony while the MOX has 64 voice polyphony. Thus, the MOX most likely has only one SWP51. The PSRs have 128 voice polyphony. If the later version of the SWP (SWP51L) has the same number of tone generating and DSP elements as the first version, then the arranger keyboards are deploying the elements differently than the Motif family instruments. Without knowing the internals of the SWP51 and its variants, this is pure speculation.

By the way, the main processor in the Motif XS is the Toshiba TX4939 RISC CPU. The CPU is clocked at 400MHz. The TX4939 is a MIPS architecture processor with several integrated I/O controllers and interfaces. The TX4939 is capable of generating an audio sampling clock and supports PCM input/output. The processor runs Monta Vista Linux. Yamaha has an equity stake in Monta Vista and distributes the GPL’ed source code three years after initial product release. Yamaha have not released source for the arranger keyboards, so most probably, the arrangers use a different embedded operating system.

The MIPS instruction set and the Renesas SH-4 instruction sets are not compatible. If the arranger and workstation product lines share software-level functionality, it must be at the source code level.

Just in case you aren’t confused enough already. The Tyros 3 has two SWP51B ICs and two SH-series CPUs (Renesas SH7727 SH-3-DSP main, and SH7206 SH-2A sub). The sub CPU handles the SWP51Bs while the main handles the user interface, etc. The microphone input is routed to one of the SWP51B ICs. Playback/record audio is routed from the other SWP51B to a gate array that interfaces to the hard drive subsystem. Wave ROM consists of four 512MBit mask ROM devices arranged in two banks for 256MBytes of total physical ROM. Tyros 3, by the way, was the first Tyros with Super Articulation 2 (SA2) voices.