I was being silly and lighthearted when I said I "blame" him! I totally understand his reasons for moving away from the forum to focus on his YT channel. I valued his presence here and do miss his contributions, but was in no way knocking him for moving on.
Sorry if my reply was too harsh. Just felt that I had to defend him a bit. And yes he did very well as a forum member. My feeling is that his motivation was "worn out" from putting too much effort into the forum compared to what he got back. Can definitely understand that feeling.
Thanks for the info on his new YT material. I did look up "sacred synthesis" recently on YT and got mired down in a lot of new age techno-swampiness that had nothing to do with him.
I was looking for him too and did various searches on youtube before I found his new profile. His music is very much appreciated.
And for what it's worth, I try, in my own small way, to contribute to this forum. I've got a lifetime of music-making behind me and the Pro One was my first synth. Dave and Sequential are vital to my own musical life. I can appreciate that there will be many people here showing up for the first time with a tech issue, however minor or baffling, and the group either digs in to help or says "contact support." But I'm not here for tech support... I don't know enough about sysex or MIDI 2.0 127 CC to have anything to contribute. I like to know what people find thrilling or fascinating about synths or about music. I dig context and creativity.
That is a very good point of view for forum participation as it deals with the substance of synthesizer use rather than typical technical support issues.
I belong to the technical side of things and find MIDI 2.0 very interesting. Short review of current state (aka press play syndrome):
MIDI 2.0 is not really here yet because absolutely essential synthesizer related features are still missing. Support for the new MIDI 2.0 protocols are slowly making it into general purpose OSes and new MIDI-CI profiles are slowly showing up.
But MIDI-CI property exchange (sort of a JSON based "web" server via sysex messages) are still very much a moving target with new feature being added or reshaped on a semi-regular basis. And their controller resource spec (M2-117-UM) is just messed up with a completely horrible 32-bit integer encoding. But the future usability of MIDI 2.0 seems very promising.
I appreciate that you've brought this particular thread back to the Evolver. I've watched the 2003 vid a few times and it always gets me plugging my own Evolver in.
The Evolver is something very special. Of cause part of its sometimes gritty sound is related to the technologies and converters it used. But with the modern Sequential and Oberheim designs a far better sound quality is possible. Hope that will be the basis of new Evolver inspired designs if they ever decide to make that will happen again.
Just as a side note and AFAIK the Take 5 and TEO-5 (and 3rd Wave) designs don't use analog VCAs but instead convert post-filter audio into the digital domain and process the audio there before its pushed back into the analog domain via D/A converters. Makes it a lot easier to do multi-timbral features. Given that noise source AFAIK is digital on said synthesizers its should be possible to add tuned feedback on these designs. Would be very cool especially on Take 5 and TEO-5. Oh well, wishful thinking!