TG55 / SY55
YAMAHA TG55 / SY55 are 16-polyphonic AWM2 synth with 2MB ROM and multimode filters. RY30 can be thought of as a simplified version of TG55. TG55 can layer 4 Voices, and has a Reverb/Delay effect and many fine-tuning parameters like complex keyboard scaling.
It's my impression that RY30's PCM engine is one of the best of all SY/TG synths. This impression may come from my editing experience of RY30. It's straightforward and much easier, compared to other SYs.
YAMAHA TG55 (1989)
YAMAHA RM50 is a rackmount version of RY30 with advanced features.
It has 133 waveforms in 3MB ROM. 1MB RAM can be installed by two SYEMB06 expansion boards. This RAM board can be installed in SY99, SY85 and TG500, too.
YAMAHA RM50 (1992)
It looks like YAMAHA TG500, as it uses the same housing. But the synthesis engine itself seems to be that of TG55. Only the RAM expansion is inherited from TG500.
More advanced envelope and LFO are added in RM50. More oscillator can be layered by pitch-shift delay.
It is a good competitor with KAWAI XD-5, which is a percussion synthesizer version of KAWAI K4. XD-5 has no LFO and pitch-shift delay, but it has 32 oscillators, many additive waves and a ring modulator.
There are other RY series; RY10, RY20, RY8 and RY9.
They all use AWM, 12-bit PCM playback without a filter, and not AWM2. Their synthesis engine is based on that of TG100 (See Related Models section of TG100 page).
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RY30
Deep Synthesis: Home12. 9. 2003