Yamaha WaveForce SW1000XG

For some months now, specifications for the SW1000XG have graced various Yamaha Web sites worldwide, and users have been salivating. It's not surprising since, for musicians, the specification sheet reads like a wish list. Primarily, the card is an extremely powerful music synthesiser boasting the same AWM2 engine as found on the Yamaha MU100 tone generator, complete with 20Mb of wavetable samples. This gives a stunning 1,267 sounds in total, including 46 drum setups, with 64 voices of polyphony. The specification also includes dual-ports for up to 32 channels of MIDI audio.

The SW1000XG complies fully with the Yamaha XG standard. This permits far more sound tweaking, adding complex musical interaction to what would otherwise be a dry collection of sampled sounds. For example, the XG specification includes reverb and chorus settings for each instrument, filter cut-off point and resonance, and a host of other settings.

What has really captured the imagination, though, is the inclusion of six 24-bit DSP (digital signal processor) buses with a palette of over 170 effects. These multiple buses allow minute control over individual parts. The reverb bus has 12 types, and each channel can be sent an individual level. In other words, if you want heavy reverb on strings but a more subtle effect on a recorded drum loop, you can do so with this single bus provided you're applying the same type of reverb.

The chorus bus works in the same way, with 14 basic types, including phase, flanger and detune settings, as does the variation bus, which has an exceptional palette of 70 effects ranging from amp simulators to Aphex Type C exciters. The variation bus can also be set as an insertion effect that will operate on one channel only, like the next two buses - insertion bus 1 and 2 - each of which boasts 42 of the 70 types found on the variation bus. The EQ bus handles two channel EQ, available to each individual part. The Master EQ bus - a full five-band parametric equaliser with gain, frequency and EQ settings for each band - applies its effects globally.

It's not just the synthesiser that marks the SW1000XG out from the crowd. This is also a high-end multichannel audio card, featuring a 20-bit Burr-Brown PCM 1800 analog-to-digital convertor (ADC) and an 18-bit NEC digital-to-analog convertor (DAC). Internal processing takes place at a higher resolution, between 24-bit and 32-bit for the best possible sound quality. The card is capable of simultaneous playback of six stereo or 12 mono channels which appear as wave one to six in the Windows multimedia control panel, so they'll appear in any application supporting MME (multimedia extensions).

It can also record two stereo channels of audio simultaneously: the first from an external analog input via the ADC; the second through internal digital loopback. The latter lets you, for example, playback a complex MIDI sequence at the same time as all six stereo wave playback channels and record it directly to the internal digital stereo loopback input. In other words, neither the wave data nor synth sounds ever leave the digital domain, allowing you to bounce tracks around almost endlessly with no loss of quality. This alone is worth the asking price.

In keeping with the all-digital theme, an S/PDIF output is provided for output directly to an external digital unit such as a DAT recorder. There's no equivalent digital input, however. This is dealt with by Yamaha's DS2416 DSP Factory card, which is designed to be used alongside the SW1000XG to give a complete digital mixing and recording studio.