2025-06-13
I've been working with the Yamaha TX16W sampler more lately. In this post I will reflect on what I'm learning from that.
Recap
Image source:
Polynominal.com
I have previously written about the TX16W. It is a rackmount sampler from 1987 that flopped commercially and then found a new life thanks to the aftermarket Typhoon operating system.
Still not using the filter
Besides having a reconstruction filter, samplers often have filters to shape and animate the sounds they produce. Early samplers used the same kind of analog filters as synthesizers. The problem with this is that each voice in the sampler needs its own filter. With a trend towards having more and more voices, that would mean more and more analog filters, driving up the cost and size of the instrument.
In the second half of the 1980s synthesizer manufacturers tried hard to come up with digital filters that lived up to the sonic expectations of the synthesizer-buying public. This was very hit and miss, and the digital filters of the TX16W are very much a miss.
I just pretend the sampler has no filters and it's still useful!
The individual outputs are confusing at first
The TX16W has a main stereo output (called "MIX") and 8 extra "individual outputs". Individual outputs are a common feature on multi-timbral instruments; they are useful if you want to treat some sounds with effects different from the rest. But how do the 16 voices of the instrument map to these 10 outputs?
It turns out the 16 voices are organized as 2 blocks of 8. The second block always goes to the main outputs. The first block on the other hand sits behind a switch: either it goes to the individual output DAC, or it gets mixed in with the second block.
A section of the block diagram on page 8/9 of the TX16W
service manual. The two "ADF" boxes are 8-way digital filters. The
left ADF represents the output of voice 1-8, and the right that of
voice 9-16. The switch between the ADF boxes controls whether the
output of the first 8 voices goes to the individual outputs, or gets
mixed into the main outputs ("OUT I" and "OUT II").
Polyphony is a scarce resource in instruments like these. When you use an invidivual output, you are taking away a voice from the main pool and dedicating it to the sounds on that output. It is wasteful that the TX16W does not let you assign one voice at a time. If I need only one voice on an individual output, I want the remaining 15 in the main pool. The TX16W shrinks the main pool to 8 voices and you "loose" 7 voices that are now also mapped to individual outputs.
In practice things are not so bad however for two reasons. You can:
- Send more stuff to individual outputs and enjoy the fact that you can have more panning variety
- Lump together unused individual outputs into a secondary, mono assignment pool
Panning alone makes individual output use worthwhile
The TX16W has the same crude panning scheme as its sibling instruments TX81Z and TX802. A sound can be centered, panned hard left, or hard right. Nothing in between. The Typhoon OS masks this shortcoming by giving you a normal pan control and then doubling your sound into the left and right channels at different strengths. The auditory effect sounds like panning but it comes at the cost of using 2 voices for what is essentialy one sound!
Because of the hard-panning limitation of the hardware, I found myself making very little use of panning on the TX16W. But if I'm forced to use more individual outputs, I can pan more sounds via those outputs on the external mixer.
You can combine individual outputs into a new voice assignment pool
Let's imagine I have only 1 sound I really want to send to individual output 1. We have again lost voices 2-8 from the main voice assignment pool. This is not great, but it turns out you can use those 7 voices to create a new pool! The Typhoon output assignment configuration lets you assign voices not just to a single output but to a range of outputs. You can assign multiple sounds to the same range. That range then becomes a separate assignment pool. If you mix those outputs together with an external mixer the result behaves the same way as the main outputs, except for one important limitation: you can only play mono sounds in this new pool.
Use an external microphone preamplifier
I don't know if this is a fault in my unit but the amount of background noise when sampling audio from a microphone straight into the TX16W is terrible. The unsurprising solution is to use an external mic preamp and send a louder signal into the machine. This was a stumbling block for me because I could not decide how to set this up in my studio (which mic preamp do I use, how do I route the cables) but I've finally figured it out.
Before this I only worked with AIFF audio files from the computer that I had to put on a virtual floppy on a USB stick first, then plug the USB stick into the floppy emulator in the TX16W. Not a spontaneous workflow. Playing audio files from the computer is useful but the fun of having a sampler is that you can sample!
Now that I have more practice, sampling into the TX16W is pretty fast and feels like a normal part of my sound design / music composition workflow.
The Typhoon OS is nice
I've never worked with the original Yamaha OS so I can't say from my own experience how good or bad it is. When I read the original manual I can tell that Typhoon is more flexible than the original OS and it implements features that the original does not have, such as time stretching, sample pitch detection, panning effects, sample rate conversion, more flexible voice assignment, etc. But apart from that there are also little usability touches that make it nice to work with.
For example, when you are sampling sounds, it is not uncommon to make multiple slightly different recordings of the same source. If you enter a sample name from the post-sample screen, keep the sample, and record another one, then the next time you see the post-sample screen the UI suggests a name based on the last one with a number tacked on. If the previous name ended in a number it gets incremented automatically. It's a little touch but it saves you having to enter a name each time.
Again on the topic of naming, say you've just recorded a sample (aka "wave" in the language of the machine). If you want to use it the next step is to create a "voice", the thing that assigns samples to keys on the keyboard. If you go to the "new voice" menu, the name is pre-populated with that of the last sample you pressed "Keep" on. The same thing happens again as you move up the object hierarchy (from "wave" to "voice" to "performance" to "setup"). This saves you a lot of typing!
The downside is that these behaviors are not always documented. I can't find the auto-naming anywhere in the manual. I had to discover it by using the machine and figuring out the patterns myself.
It all feels like Typhoon was developed by programmers who heavily used the software themselves, added workflow improvements to make their lives easier, and then not always followed through on documenting those features. Something I can relate to as a computer programmer.
Conclusion
The usability of TX16W+Typhoon is great. The way individual outputs are implemented is surprising but if you understand how it works and lean into it, it is perfectly usable. Yamaha made an unfortunate mistake putting "DIGITAL WAVE FILTERING SAMPLER" on the front panel when the filtering is best not mentioned.
All in all my appreciation for this machine grows the more I use it.