Roland SH4D - hot damn!!!

Wow looks good. 60 voice polyphony, 5 parts multi timbral (including drum part), fx per part, 64 part step sequencer, battery or usb c powered. Damn this thing is ticking a lot boxes. If I had the dough I'd get one. Nice design too. Maybe I'll pick up one second hand after 3/4 months lol.

  On 2/28/2023 at 1:05 PM, TheBro said:

Maybe I'll pick up one second hand after 3/4 months lol.

For 50 squid? 
 

It looks like a pretty nice device if you just want to bang out some classic sounding electronic tunes without a computer.

  On 2/28/2023 at 2:10 PM, Silent Member said:

It looks like a pretty nice device if you just want to bang out some classic sounding electronic tunes without a computer.

Exactly and it's portable. Shame I don't have the money! 

Is it pretend anal ogue though?

  On 2/28/2023 at 3:30 PM, Berk said:

Is it pretend anal ogue though?

Yeah, it's VA, digital pretending to be analogue.

Yeah, I'd like to see someone release an analog desktop unit with 60 voice  polyphony in that price range

  On 2/28/2023 at 1:05 PM, TheBro said:

this thing is ticking a lot boxes. 

Yeah, it's a nice box, but I have enough nice ones, I want something brilliant.

  On 2/28/2023 at 5:19 PM, baph said:

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Ha ha this guy's a legend!

  On 2/28/2023 at 5:47 PM, dcom said:

Yeah, it's a nice box, but I have enough nice ones, I want something brilliant.

The first thing I thought of was this.

Yes, that is a $100 baggie full of gravel that you just put somewhere in your room and it makes your stereo sound better because AUDIOPHILES! My favorite piece of audiphile snake il ever.  Even better than the multi thousand dollar USB cables.

  On 2/28/2023 at 10:08 PM, TubularCorporation said:

The first thing I thought of was this.

Yes, that is a $100 baggie full of gravel that you just put somewhere in your room and it makes your stereo sound better because AUDIOPHILES! My favorite piece of audiphile snake il ever.  Even better than the multi thousand dollar USB cables.

Holy fucking lol at the pebble-pouch just being sellotaped to those cables. They could at least have come up with some sort of harness for it or used a bit of transparant  heatshrink. 

  On 3/1/2023 at 8:08 AM, user said:

They could at least have come up with some sort of harness for it or used a bit of transparant  heatshrink. 

The guy who was doing that was charging anywhere from a few thousand to over $2,000,000 per cable pair depending on the model. His Youtube channel used to be amazing but after he was banned from all the audiophile messageboards mental illness caught up with him (as far as I can tell) and he deleted all of the oldvgreenscreen stuff a few years ago.  Now all he does is upload first person footage of him walking his dog in the woods with voiceover in character as the dog and it's no longer funny, just kind of sad.

Apparently enough people took it seriously that there are some customer reviews still floating around, and I don't think all of them were written by him.

https://www.audiogon.com/listings/interconnects-coconut-audio-unreal-rca-interconnects-the-best-for-last-2014-10-12-cables

EDIT: the cables reviewed in that link weren't $1.5 million - 1.5M is the length.  The price was a mere $45,000.

I tried to find some photos of them, but it's tough - not even archive.org has his old site.

Here's a thumbnail of one of his audiophile USB cables:

I've got my issues with the DSM, but I think there's a strong argument for adding audiophilia to the next edition.

@TubularCorporation

lol this is hilarious… totally agreed with adding audiophilia to the classification 

btw… what are your issues with the dsm?

some interesting moments in here showcasing the more raw sound design capabilities.

  On 3/1/2023 at 4:06 PM, xox said:

@TubularCorporation

lol this is hilarious… totally agreed with adding audiophilia to the classification 

btw… what are your issues with the dsm?

I jsut think the focus since the 70s has shifted too far toward medicalization, and it's part of the reason.  Not that it's bad, just that the taxonomical aproach to psychology  should be one tool out of many but right now it's absolutely dominant. 

If you watch the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (one of the greatest movies of all time), there's a really obvious read of it as an allegory about the shift from the social model of psychology to the medical model, which was a big thing in the 70s, and I'm more in the social camp. I've got a B.S. in music technology, so I'm obviously very qualified to talk about this and my opinions should hold a lot of weight.

Anyway, people who actually know what they're talking about (or at least allegedly do) also don't agree on any of this stuf, so I don't think it's actually a very hot take at all.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sax-sex/201306/critique-dsm-5

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26772207/

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-modern-mind/201305/the-real-trouble-dsm-5

I'm basically a left-liberal humanist if I had to label myself (which feels gross to do TBH) and I see a lot of illiberal, antihumanist qualities in what I know about some of the most popular schools of therapy (looking at you, CBT).

  On 3/1/2023 at 5:17 PM, TubularCorporation said:

I jsut think the focus since the 70s has shifted too far toward medicalization, and it's part of the reason.  Not that it's bad, just that the taxonomical aproach to psychology  should be one tool out of many but right now it's absolutely dominant. 

 

If you watch the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (one of the greatest movies of all time), there's a really obvious read of it as an allegory about the shift from the social model of psychology to the medical model, which was a big thing in the 70s, and I'm more in the social camp. I've got a B.S. in music technology, so I'm obviously very qualified to talk about this and my opinions should hold a lot of weight.

 

Anyway, people who actually know what they're talking about (or at least allegedly do) also don't agree on any of this stuf, so I don't think it's actually a very hot take at all.

 

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sax-sex/201306/critique-dsm-5

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26772207/

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-modern-mind/201305/the-real-trouble-dsm-5

 

I'm basically a left-liberal humanist if I had to label myself (which feels gross to do TBH) and I see a lot of illiberal, antihumanist qualities in what I know about some of the most popular schools of therapy (looking at you, CBT).

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tl;dr - yes, it’s not perfect but it’s the best we could have atm

If im not mistaken, non of these 3 papers were written by a psychiatrist and non of these authors proposed a reasonable solution for the problems they have with the classification (and obviously with psychiatry in general). That doesn’t mean that every single psychiatrist agrees with the classification; but the majority does for a reason; it gets published only after healthy majority agrees with it.
Dsm is not perfect bc it’s impossible to make it perfect/flawless! = no classification of anything will ever be perfect! But it is a psychiatric classification based on today’s understandings of mental disorders and (unfortunately) today’s political realities on the west and as a classification it shouldn’t be used for understanding the mental disorders but rather the other way around; it can be properly used (without being threatened by it in any way) as an additional tool and guide for treatments, communication and scientific studies only if we understand well enough the general and specific psychopathology, the physiology and pathology of the brain and body, general medicine, history of psychiatric disorders, psychometrics, research in the field of psychiatry, general psychology and psychodynamic theories, psychopharmacology and neurology. Then diagnosis like unspecified schizophrenia is not that confusing at all.

edit: the synth sounds better than i expected

It might pair well with a better sequencer  

  On 3/2/2023 at 12:59 AM, xox said:

tl;dr - it’s the best we could have atm

I guess we'll have to agree to disagree here, but it's certainly not the worst we could have.

  On 3/2/2023 at 1:17 AM, YEK said:

It might pair well with a better sequencer  

from what i noticed it seems to have a plenty robust sequencer for a 'synthesizer' but not particularly useful if looking at it as a 'groovebox'. the problem is that it's dangerously close to being a groovebox so many are seeing it as one and judging it like that.

i'm definitely interested in its drum synthesis, just as much as the rest of it. but yeah i'm also thinking about it being used with a better sequencer....i rarely sequence on device these days so that's just my personal default perspective.

edit: i'm assuming you were talking about the SH-4d and not the DSM or audiophile dildos. ignore my response above if i'm incorrect.

  On 3/2/2023 at 3:16 AM, auxien said:

from what i noticed it seems to have a plenty robust sequencer for a 'synthesizer' but not particularly useful if looking at it as a 'groovebox'. the problem is that it's dangerously close to being a groovebox so many are seeing it as one and judging it like that.

i'm definitely interested in its drum synthesis, just as much as the rest of it. but yeah i'm also thinking about it being used with a better sequencer....i rarely sequence on device these days so that's just my personal default perspective.

 

edit: i'm assuming you were talking about the SH-4d and not the DSM or audiophile dildos. ignore my response above if i'm incorrect.

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Could go well with my RS or even a Digitakt now that they have song mode. 

Said this in another thread as well, but: how is this different from an MC-101 with knobs? Ok, you get one channel extra but you can do sound design on the MC-101 now, too, and it, too, uses the Encore engine. I'm really not getting why both the MC line and this should exist.

  On 3/2/2023 at 4:50 AM, YEK said:

Could go well with my RS or even a Digitakt now that they have song mode. 

RS?

Digitakt just got a big update yesterday too, on top of the song mode from a few months ago. would be a good pairing with a synthesizer like the SH-4d i'm sure. 

  On 3/2/2023 at 1:50 PM, auxien said:

RS?

Digitakt just got a big update yesterday too, on top of the song mode from a few months ago. would be a good pairing with a synthesizer like the SH-4d i'm sure. 

Yamaha RS 7000

  On 3/2/2023 at 3:22 PM, YEK said:

Yamaha RS 7000

oh nice! should’ve known that’s what you meant. 

i imagine there’s a lot of overlap in basic capabilities with the RS, but i think the RS sequencer is probably more robust (never touched one so going off my shit memory reading/hearing about it in the past)