Every part of that synthesizer is decades past it's intended lifespan. To actually see and hear this instrument today is just mesmerizing. Imagine the costs of keeping one in service today.
That machine alway gives me an immediate Vangelis association. It was so prevalent in his films scores that for me the CS80 is Vangelis. There’s this one little scene where he sits with Ridley Scott composing for 1492 Conquest or Paradise I believe it was and Ridley explains kind of awkwardly what he wants. Vangelis sits behind his keyboard and starts playing. And you see Ridley’s eyes light up and Vangelis says: “something like that?!” -“That’s it!” “Well now the only question is how to do that?” Vangelis says z And Ridley says: “I believe you just did it!” And o frankly had no idea what Ridley was on about but great composers like Vangelis and Anthony, Zimmer and JunkieXL (Holkenborg, I know him as a gigging musician in the 90s here in NL, when often we played the same festivals or venues) they have this weird telepathic connection with the director as to what they want. I do miss playing live but I don’t miss the hauling of equipment and the travel and the rehearsal and they stinky toilets on festivals and the mud 😂😂😂
Dear Anthony, I remember going to my favorite music store in Stuttgart when I was 17 and seeing the CS 80 literally fenced in so nobody but the staff could even touch it, let alone play it. It was on display like the altar in my church. When I asked the sales person how much this synth cost I just got a very snobby laugh and no answer. I only found out many years later that that was the synth that my (our) beloved Vangelis used. Today I'm 64 and I haven't seen one since and I would give a lot to get behind that fence... Ah, to still have dreams..! Thank you so much for letting me have a peek into the inside of the Eighth Wonder of the analog synthesizer world! And I am in awe of Rob Rosen. I love how he talks about the specifics of the CS. I can feel his admiration and respect for the ingenuity and craftsmanship that made this marvelous synth possible. Big thanks to Rob! As always a pleasure, Thomas
This might be stated elsewhere in the comments, but “CS” stands for “Combo Synthesizer”. This is printed on the covers of the CS series service manuals, anyway…
In a strange twist of fate, I had in my possession a brand new Yamaha CS-80 for 3 months when I was 14 years old back in 1978 (it's a long story of how that happened.) It was the second synth I had ever played, the first being a brand new ARP Odyssey MK III a few months before that. Night and day difference between both synths, but I loved them both, and it's how I learned to program synths. Wish I could have kept that CS-80 though...
As an electromechanical engineer with some experience in electronics, a question for Rob: Doesn't all this wiring cause a lot of grounding and interference issues when restoring these devices?
Great question! In fact, you’ll notice this 80 has a bunch of blue zip ties in the rack. This is part of a fix that has to do with shielded wire grounding issues that’s corrected in later 80’s. Indeed they suffer from grounding issues occasionally.
Simply amazing. One of my favorite digital emulation synths big time. Hopefully one day get to try the real deal. Btw, did it originally come with a screwdriver and a soldering iron? 😅
Rob’s knowledge and experience is priceless and the way he explains the magic and complexity of this beast is something I could listen to all day Thank you so much for sharing
Holy Cow!!!! The guts of the CS-80 are insane! The depth of the inside matches the depth of the sound it puts out for sure!!! Thanks for this overview. Synth nerd heaven!
Isn't this also the synth the Blackbyrds used for 'Mysterious vibes'? Been looking for that sound for ages...and I still haven't found what I'm looking for... ;-) Love this channel. I've got he Arturia VST version and I prefer your demo's on the real thing to actually reading the manual of the VSTi Best regards
I love vintage synths and have too many of them but I had to go into the modular “rabbit hole” to really understand the building blocks of the whole thing. Now I can understand better when two masters have a chat like this. This is like a fantastic college lecture. Thank you professors.
i've been obsessed with these machines since 2007 and WHAT A COOL LOOK AT THIS BEAST!!! i cant wait to binge the other videos like this!!!! Rosen-Clip is the MAN!!!
I would love to hear about these dedicated yamaha circuits that put the CS80 on the map. A italian organ of the time had even more wires than this. These japanese master piece chips is what set the CS80 apart. Then there is the intuitive interface of knobs, sliders and buttons. Something slowly returning to new synthesizers. I would love a sequal to this dedicated to the chips involved. As he explained. More and more of these chip design are remanufactured. All those wires can be replaced by circuitboards.
I've serviced and restored electronic organs before, which are often insanely complex inside, but the CS-80 still takes the cake in terms of complexity. I don't envy owning one of these and having to re-tune and service it so often haha
it still blows my mind, that even today, when it is ridiculously easy to design a MIDI controller, why POLYPHONIC AFTERTOUCH isn't available by _DEFAULT_?
This video made me pick up Cherry GX-80 and already very very happy with the couple of synthwavey-bladerunner-esque tracks I've made. Can't wait to get super deep into modulations.
I was reminded as I watched and listened that sometimes with these older instruments, limiting our thoughts to analog versus digital gets in the way of including some of the instrument’s reaction to the player’s behavior being merely electrical and sometimes mechanical with no electricity involved at all. And analog did speak a primitive form of binary when it detected ON and OFF states.
Excellent vid, just a shame that once the synth was opened up, the camera guy should have stayed behind you guys, so that he could give the viewer a proper look at all the boards etc close up & not edge on... Which was actually the point of the vid?
Holy mother of Isis! Incredible machine! I got a Yamaha home organ for free and didn't realize the behemoth was very similar to this. I, being a dumbass, recycled it. Wish I'd known. Would have saved, cut it down, modified, and might have made something cool. Kick my own ass. No one has to do it for me. Lol!
I loved it when analog/digital convo happened about the cmos logic stuff. Yes, an analog square wave is a high/low, 1/0 digital signal. Even worse, your ears are analog, your brain is digital. What is the ADC?
Regarding the oscillaotr. Anthony, don't think about it in terms of harmonics, that's the additive synthesis brain. This is subtractive. It's all about changing voltage in time. So the core of the oscillator produces a straight up sawtooth (by periodically discharging a capacitor or somesuch). This generates a change in the voltage that LOOKS like a sawtooth wave. From here, you can use other circuitry to "physically" reshape that sawtooth to other shapes. You're not adding or removing harmonics as you would on an additive synth. You're literally reshaping the waveform, just like you would add distortion to a guitar signal before hitting the amplifier - put enough gain in and anything becomes a square wave.
Besides its current crazy market price (although prices seem to go lower even below 35k), the parts are now unobtanium and makes me scared to buy one. Btw. As a former tech seeing, no esd safety strap and touching the printboards was hard to watch (yes you can damage them even if there is no power on) 😂
I think we or indeed the synth manufactures really lost that expressive touch. I also think we are now seeing signs of it's return in modern day synths. Mainly at the top end of the market, but certainly not entirely. Aftertouch or even Poly aftertouch is making a return, as if it's a new thing? Well it's certainly good marketing, but it also benefits the player so much. I do understand why such features were lost to time or no longer added through the years. Just look at the CS-80 or even a very different beast across the room the Jupiter 8, insanely complex and expensive to built etc.
Boy, what a beautifully nerdy interview! I finally subscribed after watching this. You did a terrific job asking all the ‘ignorant’ questions that were popping in my head. Thoroughly enjoyed this!
the discussion at 14:29 - You can indeed do digital logic, without a computer. e.g. Atari Pong does not have a microprocessor, and instead does every aspect with some sort of counter, buffer, or gate. This is what we used to call "random" or discrete logic. The CS80 is doing the same thing here, although thankfully the control voltage sampling, output, and voice signalling are being done with what are called ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits). ASICs are _VERY_ expensive to make, as they require an entire process of logic design, and layout onto silicon, a process that, for a nominal yield of say, 100,000 ICs would have cost something close to $500,000 in 1976. This is why custom logic design is only done when you're going to either be making a whole lot of a given device, OR you have no other choice, that is, the equivalent design using 7400 (TTL) or 4000 series (CMOS) logic would have taken up far too much board space.
Whenever I see the CS-80's inside, it's impressive and intimidating but I still always feel like MacGyver put it together and I'm impressed this thing actually works. :D
Freaking amazing! I just want to provide a bit more context regarding one statement from the video: binary logic does NOT necessarily mean "digital". Binary logic just means you're only using 0 and 1 to do things. Those things can be analog. Boolean algebra is based on binary logic, and this all existed way before the first digital computer was ever made.
What a fascinating video. The complexity of this instrument is a testament to human ingenuity. Like when craftsmen of old would spend years designing a majestic pipe organ for a cathedral, forging all the parts from wood, metal, ivory, and leather, by hand, without electricity. It's the same spirit of creativity to make something wonderful that elevates the human soul.
Wow, that was really deep. When I was in high school in 1986 I answered an ad from a guy who was selling one of those for (wait for it),... $200.00. Yes, that's right, two-hundred dollars and zero cents. Unfortunately someone else got there right before me and snatched it up. Honestly though, I couldn't have done the care and feeding required to keep one of these running for 35+ years.
So the voice board shown at 22:33 implements the filter in an IC chip? I thought the whole synth was from discrete components. Or some parts like counters etc always comes in chips late 70s? Trying to understand if this was the latest and greatest technology for the parts.
That’s correct. The IG00156 is a filter core used in many Yamaha synths. Each CS-80 M board has 2 of them, one for HPF and one for LPF. Like most chips, it requires many support components to function in its intended way.
It is extremely impressive that Yamaha decided to make a synth with such complexity. A true flag ship. Thanks for the tour. Behringer is working on a clone of this. But now that I see how complex it is, I don't think they will be able pull it off properly. Even if they were to reverse engineer the chips, there is still all the variation caused by the analog circuits in the envelopes, filters, ring mod, heat, calibration, ... that is difficult to reproduce digitally. Furthermore, they will never make a keyboard with such long keys. And no long throw sliders for accurate control. Time to win the lottery.
❤❤❤😮Thanks you, really crazy, it’s like a church analogue they have made. The sad news for the most of us, it’s to know the only cs80 we gone play are plugin 😂. But now we now why 😅
The famous brass synth riff that defines Toto's 'Africa' was done using presets Brass I & Brass II on the CS -80. There's been a lot of confusion on this over the decades now as some people thought it was the Yamaha GS1, others thought it was an Oberheim. I recently watched a video clip where Steve Porcaro himself actually spoke to this and identified the CS-80 as the instrument and which presets were used.
