alt Hacker NewsIt's a really good question why Casio didn't continue making synths after the 80s. It's possible that the entire CZ-line was intended to be a one-off response to Yamaha's breakaway success with the DX7. After the CZ-line, it looks like Casio tried to keep up with Yamaha for a few years, but exited the market after Yamaha launched the SY-line. From what I understand, the CZ-series were great sellers then, but even with all of the nostalgia they'd never move large numbers now.
For what it's worth, Yamaha aren't particularly nostalgic about their cult-classic synths either. I guess that from their perspective, the DX7 and CZ-101 were already obsolete within a few short years. By 1990 the sound had already become quite dated, and technology had moved on. Now that they've become popular again as a cult-classic, the margin just isn't there anymore because of the market share of software, or cheap independent FM/PD synths.
Shameless plug, in case anyone is interested, I've done some work reverse-engineering some of these synths:
- https://github.com/ajxs/casio_cz101_rom_disassembly
- https://ajxs.me/blog/uCOM-87_The_Strangest_Architecture_Youv...
Awesome. When I was researching the CZ 101 (still am, actually), I spent some time reading the MAME implementation, including the NEC upd933 chip emulation. I was going to say I'm surprised I didn't find your docs, but it looks like they were all published late last year which is precisely when I was doing my research (I used the holiday to work on some projects I'd been stewing on in the back of my mind, and a phase distortion plugin was one of them).
I don't know why I find that era of synth so enjoyable and interesting, but I do. I love every FM synth, but that side of things feels pretty well covered by existing tools. Korg makes the OpSix (and I have two), Yamaha has the reface DX and I think their workstations still ship an AFM engine, and there are at least a half dozen plugins that are mostly quite accurate, and a handful of other hardware options.
Phase distortion just feels more neglected, so that's the one I've been spending time on. I have an excellent engine running, which is more accurate than the Arturia CZ V engine (at least compared to my actual CZ 101, maybe they were comparing against another model, but the MAME engine is also like the real CZ and not like Arturia, so I am inclined to say Arturia got sloppy), but I'm going pretty slow on the UI. Making a nice plugin UI for a synth that didn't have a nice UI is a challenge. You can't just copy the original UI if you want it to be fun to use.