Just a shot of the Siel DK600 sent my way via Brian Comnes. I always wanted one of these for some reason. Brian also pulled the following from the sale details. "The DK-600 is Siel's unique Italian take on the mid-eighties programmable polysynth with MIDI implementation (badged as the Opera-6 in the UK). Just like the Juno-106 and Poly-61 of the time, the Siel is a 6 voice synthesizer with straight forward programming, simple effects and digitally controlled analog oscillators (DCO's). However, the Siel, having dual oscillators per voice sounds thicker than the Juno or Matrix because it's got 12 oscillators! And because they're DCO's, you know they'll always remain stable and in-tune even though they are analog in nature. The DK-600 has many other nice features such as complete MIDI implementation. There are 3 LFO's for extreme modulation. Both the filter and amplifier have standard ADSR envelope sections. And like similar synths, all the sliders and buttons are intuitively placed on the front panel for hands-on real-time programming."
Sounds thicker because it has 12 oscillators? Um... Yeah... It's still only two per voice. The Matrix also has 12, two per voice, and the 106 has a sub osc, although you can't detune the sub osc.
Ah, yes, the DK600, my first synthesizer (second keyboard, after the Casio SK1).
ReplyDelete"A full midi implementation" may be a bit overstating things. Supposedly there was a way to set it to listen to a specific channel, but that never worked on mine, so it was stuck in OMNI mode. It did send/receive notes, velocity, and pitch/mod wheels, though. I've heard that it supports some funky kind of sysex dump (not realtime), but I never was able to get that going.
The sound was very smooth, IIRC.