Vintage Synth Explorer

Siel • DK 80

The Siel DK-80 is an odd synth that could be said to bridge the gap between low end mid-eighties Roland and Sequential type synthesizers. It is an analog synth with digital control. It is also bi-timbral with a split keyboard mode giving you 2 polysynths in one keyboard! The sounds are OK, and the DK-80 makes a great backup synth. It has an on-board two-track sequencer, chord memory and hold, programmable stereo panning and sweeping. Parameters are edited one at a time and via membrane push buttons. For a fair price the DK-80 is certainly an exotic addition to any synth set up but may be too limited to use as your main or only analog synth. It is used by Eat Static

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Midimetric

Posted 68 days ago

Done ! A Sysex document is downloadable free on my site at :
- www.midimetric.com/download/siel_dk80_undocumented_midi_syse x.pdf
- www.midimetric.com/download/siel_ex80_undocumented_midi_syse x.pdf

Midimetric

Posted 94 days ago

I found that the DK80 responds to some undocumented sysex message ;) Try to send him the request F0 21 00 nn F7 (with nn standing for the patch number) and it will dump the corresponding patch data. I am still stduying the content of the dump...
Meanwhile the request F0 21 00 64 F7 seems to trigger a quite long message... maybe the sequencer data ?

Apex4me

Posted 174 days ago

It was mid 1984 the DX-7 was selling strong. I was a Salesman at Apex Music in San Diego. There was a concert at the Fox theatre up the street and the keyboardist for the band Black Uhuru came in looking for a deal on theDX-7. I demo'd the keyboard as Tom Piggot showed us to. The guy chose the DX-80 over the DX-7. (Actually the $1395.00 Price tag sold him over the DX priced at $1895.00.
Or was it that the Tom Piggot Demo worked again.)
The Bitimbric sounds are great!
I still own one of these in my personal collection as well as the DK-70 w/the remote grip!

Dk80

Posted 333 days ago

The oscillators are DCOs not VCOs. In the 1980's there was a sound editor software for Commodore 64 for this synth. Great machine btw, I have one.

Rich

Posted 430 days ago

Actually, it does not have membrane buttons. The graphics on the left is just a legend that tells what parameter number to enter. All the editing is done with the numeric keypad on the right.

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