IXA Overview
CTK-1000 Synthesis Engine

IXA Overview

CTK-1000's IXA engine combines a PCM playbacker, and a new 'Nonlinear digital' synthesizer. It's made as a little workstation-type Casiotone, which integrates digital effects, 4-track sequencer, rhythm section, and accompaniment, etc.

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The voice architecture
CTK-1000 is a 16-polyphonic synthesizer.
One voice is made of two sound sources: PCM+PCM, PCM+Nonlinear, and maybe, Nonlinear+Nonlinear. There seems to be no deep interaction between PCM and Nonlinear, unlike YAMAHA SY77 / SY99.

Editability
There are only 3 parameters available: Attack, Release, and 'Wave.' The parameter range is 1-9.
Wave parameter affects PCM wave selection, and Nonlinear synthesizer settings. Users can only select a Wave setting from several preset patterns.

MIDI system exclusive is not available, and deep editing is impossible. If it were fully editable, it could have been one of the most powerful digital synthesizers.

PCM engine
The PCM section is just a playbacker without a filter. The bit resolution is not clear, but CASIO mainly used 16-bit at that time. It's my impression that the sampling frequency has some limits, but in general it sounds clear and big enough.
There are accoustic multi-samples and one-shot drum samples. There may be only 20 or 30 accoustic samples. 'Jam loops' like Roland D-50 / D-110 are included, which is combinations of several different samples.

Nonlinear engine
It seems to be two (or more) oscillators combined with nonlinear functions. It has no filter.
The nonlinear functions seem to include Sync. I'm not sure but there may be Ring Modulation, Phase Distortion. There may be even Cross Modulation (FM) or other unknown nonlinear function. See the sound page for details.

Effects
There are 8 Effect types: Hall, Room, Delay, Stereo Delay, Chorus, Flanger, Distortion+Delay/Flanger, and Chorus+Reverb. Two parameters for each and the mix balance can be edited.




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10. 27. 2003