Yamaha SY77 - Legacy

Legacy

The SY/TG range as a whole was discontinued sometime between 1995 and 1997. The SY77 and SY99 were replaced as the flagship Yamaha synthesizer workstations by the W7 and W5, respectively. However, the SY77 and SY99 were the last Yamaha "flagship" workstations to be natively capable of the fully fledged FM synthesis that had been introduced with the DX line. Yamaha's later FS1r was the most advanced of their FM synthesizers, adding the long-awaited 8-operator synthesis and the innovative formant synthesis (hence FS), but it was a rack-mounted module and never received much attention, and so it was discontinued rapidly, with the result that units today are both hard to find and expensive.

Some subsequent products by Yamaha included FM to certain extents. The Motif and Motif ES lines have an FM option available through the PLD150DX expansion cards, which enable monotimbral voicing with up to 16 notes of polyphony per card. The DX200 is a groovebox-style repackaging of the exact same expansion card into a table-top chassis with an added drum machine. The virtual-analog AN1x can use its two oscillators to produce limited 2-operator (1 carrier + 1 modulator) FM. However, these later products are now dated and discontinued themselves, and Yamaha have not shown any further interest in FM synthesis since.