Chapter 9: All About Plg - Yamaha SW1000XG Advanced Manualbook

Chapter 9
All about PLG
What is PLG?
As we discussed at the very start of this guide, the SW1000XG is a truly remarkable card in that not only is it very
powerful as a stand-alone product, but it is also very expandable. The 2 interface connectors located along the top of
the card for connection to the PLG series of daughterboards and the DS2416 audio card make it practically future
proof. In this chapter we shall discuss the PLG cards, and why they are so important to the SW1000XG.
PLG unlike other expansion systems available for synth modules made by other manufacturers doesn't just add
some new samples to the original sound set (although as we shall see it can). It adds a whole lot more. In fact
several of the currently available PLG cards for the SW1000XG add completely new synthesis and effects processing
engines to the original SW1000XG, without, we hasten to add, taking anything away from the original card.
Yamaha had a massive amount of success in the early 90's with the DB50XG daughterboard. This was a card that
gave XG synth capabilities, to any card that had a standard 26-pin Wave Blaster style of connector. As there were no
drivers to configure or setup (it was literally plug and play!) it found a home in many studios, both amateur and
professional. The huge increase in the overall quality of sound compared to other soundcards is why many people
today have latched on to XG, and one of the reasons why the SW1000XG with its huge increase in features over the
DB50XG is so successful.
The PLG interface connector was a new concept in daughterboard connectivity. Not only did it replace the standard
analogue audio outputs of the Wave Blaster connector with professional digital interfacing, it also allowed extra real
time effects processing to be added to the host device by virtue of an insert style send and return path.
It also meant that entirely new synths such as Physical modeling, FM and Analogue modeling could be added thus
increasing the life of the host device by many years, and at an incredibly low cost.
If you think that to buy a whole new synth which provides full SVA physical modeling, on top of the SW1000XG
engine, uses no CPU power, and sounds incredible would have cost only a few years ago somewhere in the region
of $8000 US dollars, is now available in a PLG card at under $200, it makes you realise just how powerful and
important PLG is to the future of Yamaha's soundcards.
So in the rest of this chapter, we shall cover some of the major points and features of the current crop of PLG cards,
and give a brief history lesson to people who may not be aware of the hugely successful products that their engines
were taken from.
PLG100-DX – The return of the DX7
Roll the clock back to the early part of the 80's. Those heady days of bad haircuts and synth-pop saw an explosion in
the use of synthesisers (mainly analogue at the time) for music. The keyboards were big, heavy, unreliable and
expensive (as anyone who owned one would testify). Then in 1983 Yamaha came onto the scene with what is still
the most successful keyboard of all time, the DX7.
This synth re-defined all pop music for the next 5 years. Anyone who was anyone had to have one. The DX7 was
seen on pop music shows being used by every band, it really was the 'must have' keyboard. At the Live Aid concert
in 1985 almost every group had a DX7 on stage which was testament to it's unique sound. The sound of the DX7
unlike all of the subtractive analogue synths that were around at the time, relied on 'real world' physics. It basically
involved the mixing and adding of sine waves, which could feedback on each other, along with a few other digital
tricks to create sounds the likes of which had not been heard before. This technique developed by a Stanford
University genius by the name of John Chowning in the 1960's had been under development by Yamaha for several
years. It was only with the ground breaking price and reliability of the DX7 that it really reached its full potential.
It was a new concept, and quite difficult to program, but for those who did, one that was very rewarding
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