Yamaha DX7 Official Technical Analysis
In the closing remarks of my original DX7 article I wrote that the only way that we could learn more about the DX7 from here was to disassemble the firmware, decapsulate the internal sound chips, or to obtain Yamaha's official internal documentation. In the year since I published that article, the first two of those things came to pass. Now, we get the third. In a real stroke of luck, some of Yamaha's original technical documentation of the DX7 has surfaced!
The fantastic Grant of Music Technologies Group, was kind enough to forward me an interesting eBay auction he found for a document titled Yamaha DX7 Technical Analysis1. Obviously this got my attention immediately. A few weeks and some exorbitant shipping costs later the document was in my hands. It was definitely worth the wait.
During the research for my original DX7 article I scoured the internet for any technical material I could find, poring over monochrome scans of service manuals, schematics, and patent literature. In all my searching, I never encountered a single mention of this document anywhere.
This 90-page booklet is definitely the real deal2. Laser-printed on high-quality glossy paper (slightly yellowed over the decades), it's clear that this is authentic Yamaha documentation. It's extremely well written, complete with many amazing diagrams, illustrations, and interesting details of the DX7's engineering.
I've scanned all of the individual pages3,
and uploaded the compiled document to archive.org.
It's now freely available here.
Please forgive the document quality:
Archive.org re-compress the uploaded PDF,
converting it from the original high-quality greyscale scan into a different format.
I also have no control over archive.org's OCR process.
If you would like to host the original high-quality scan somewhere, please get in touch.
The descriptions of the individual internal circuits are detailed, and extremely informative.
Among many other details,
the documentation features an interesting classification of the data transferred between the CPU,
and the EGS/OPS into three categories:
EVENT, DATA, and TIME.
This hints at a possible naming scheme used in the original firmware assembly to classify the data.
Unfortunately I wasn't able to discover any details about the document's provenance. The seller wasn't from a technical background, and couldn't tell me more than that he had purchased it himself in an online auction some time ago. He was selling a wealth of other service manuals, so maybe he'd gotten it from a technician liquidating their collection.
Who was the book's intended audience? Was it for the benefit of Yamaha's international engineering teams, or their international service centres? It seems strange that Yamaha would publish such a document for the sake of the public's curiosity. One particularly interesting detail is that the booklet is written in perfect English. The text accompanying the cartoons in the margin appear to be hand written, suggesting that the booklet was originally written in English. If anyone has any extra details about the history of this book, I would love to know.
When I wrote my original technical analysis of the DX7, I really didn't expect that any of the original technical documentation would ever surface. Needless to say, this has been a great surprise. Unfortunately I don't have high hopes for any more original technical literature surfacing. One can only wonder what kind of material Yamaha themselves would still have in their possession at this point. With the DX7 itself rapidly approaching four decades old, and the golden jubilee around the corner for many of Yamaha's original FM patents, I would imagine that as much information has become public as ever will. At any rate, I hope that this document comes in handy for other synth hackers keen to understand the DX7.
- It's a very strange coincidence indeed that this piece of official technical literature bears the same name as my own article! I don't even have a good reason for how I arrived at the name Technical Analysis, I picked the name arbitrarily, and just couldn't think of anything better to call it! ↲
- I'm not sure how to interpret the numerical codes in the bottom margin of the front cover. The format of which matches that of the DX7's better known technical literature. It likely indicates the document was printed in October of 1984. The book itself is light on details of its authorship, instead it gets straight down to business. ↲
- The book also included the DX7 schematics in an A1 fold-out, which isn't included in my scans. The schematics have been freely available online for some time as part of the DX7/9 service manual. The best version of the schematics is this version, redrawn and reworked by yamahamusicians.com user Miks. It doesn't get much better than this, so there's not much point me re-scanning them. ↲