I’m a little confused.. :-\
It would seem that a fully stuffed MB-6582 (8 Sids) would have 8 voices, but I’m reading in a few places mentioning of 4 voices stereo?
Stereo is great, but I’d like to use mine as a meaty mono 8 voice polysynth..
Sorry if this is a no-brainer question, just want to clarify 100%
Regards
Mike
It’s in the manual:
SPV (Super Poly Voices): this is currently an experimental feature which allows to play lead instruments with multiple SID cores in a polyphonic manner. The usage is not selfexplaining, and it requires some additional configuration to get it properly working.
The superpoly handler couples 2, 3 or 4 SID cores (master/slaves). Only lead patches are supported by this function (yet), accordingly it isn’t possible to play 8 voices individually, only 4 mono or stereo voices.
I used to have a real C64 and I remember one sid chip could produce 3 voices (3 osc’s).
So it should be possible to produce 8x3 = 24 voices or 12 voices stereo.
I haven’t finished me midibox sid yet so I can’t confirm this is possible.
Can I produce 12 or 24 voices on the midibox sid?
From the Manual
But also monophonic assignments are possible, which allows to play up to 6 different instruments the same time (Sidenote: which means, that if your MIDIbox SID is stuffed with 4 cores and 8 SIDs, you can play up to 24 instruments - this section talks about the engine running on a single core, but you are free to use it on multiple cores in parallel).
Best Regards, Thorsten.
So, Currently For the MB-6582, If i want to use mine mostly as a poly synth, we are talking about 4 voices max..
What difficulties are there in working the SPV mode? How ‘experimental’ is this as it’s the feature that i’m thinking I’ll most be using?..
Are there plans to upgrade it up to 8 voices, or is this a hardware limitation?
Thanks for your prompt replies.
Regards
Mike
So, Currently For the MB-6582, If i want to use mine mostly as a poly synth, we are talking about 4 voices max..
Yeah it’s four stereo voices, but since each “voice” is a pair of SIDs, and each SID has three oscillators, so that’s six oscillators that could be detuned or octave shifted… I’m not saying that more wouldn’t be nice, but you can get some pretty fat sound with “only” four. 
What difficulties are there in working the SPV mode? How ‘experimental’ is this as it’s the feature that i’m thinking I’ll most be using?..
No difficulties, it works fine. You just have to remember to select all SID engines (that are in SPV mode) when you change patch.
Are there plans to upgrade it up to 8 voices, or is this a hardware limitation?
Hardware limitiation - TK’s already squeezed as much as he can out of an 8-bit PIC. Maybe MB-SID V3 on a new microcontroller will have 8 voices… start praying now.
sweet!
I could imagine that 4 stereo voices each with 6 Oscillators would be pretty fat…
Much regards.
Mike