Synclavier SPX-90
This page can't be written yet. The model identity is unresolved.
Overview
This entry is a stub, and it stays one until the research is sorted. The documentation isn't thin. It contradicts the page title. Every source we have attaches the name "SPX-90" to Yamaha, not to Synclavier. The SPX-90 was Yamaha's digital reverb and multi-effects processor, and the SPX-90II was its later revision. Synclavier was the trade name of New England Digital's digital music system. Nothing in the available material describes a Synclavier SPX-90, because no such product appears to exist.
What the sources do show is the Yamaha unit in working studios. A 1988 studio update in Recording-Engineer (January 1988, p.74) lists a Yamaha SPX-90 among a New Jersey facility's recent purchases, alongside a Valley People Autogate and Leveller. That's a rack effect, not a synthesizer. Gear lists from the same era place the SPX-90 and SPX-90II in house signal-processing racks next to Lexicon reverbs and dbx gates.
The "Synclavier" half of the title does have a real paper trail. It just doesn't connect to the SPX-90. A DB-Magazine (September 1987, p.30) studio profile describes a Synclavier Enhanced Digital Music System with a 200-track digital memory recorder, 32 megabytes of RAM, 750 megabytes of Winchester disk drives, and 32-voice polyphonic sampling with 32-voice FM. That system has nothing to do with a Yamaha effects box, and the two should never have been filed under one heading.
There is one more thing for whoever cleans this up. A separate source describes Opcode's Macintosh editor/librarian software for the Yamaha SPX-90 and SPX-90II, retailing at $150. It let users edit more than one patch at a time and copy parameters between effects and reverb patches. That's a citable fact about the Yamaha SPX-90, and it belongs on the Yamaha SPX-90 page, not here.
The archive has no verified facts for a product called the Synclavier SPX-90. The evidence points to a filing error, not a rare or obscure instrument. Anyone searching for a Synclavier should look at New England Digital's digital music systems. Anyone searching for an SPX-90 should look at Yamaha's reverb and effects processor.
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