Twisted Electrons MEGAfm

This french 4 operator FM synth is not a Yamaha clone. It uses two Yamaha YM2612 chips as used in Sega's Mega Drive/Genesis video game consoles. So it is not the chip of the well known FM synths by Yamaha. Due to time-division multiplexing of the chips to play one sample of each voice in sequence, it got a peculiar form of crossover distortion. Technically is different, as these chips include the D/A converter.

The MEGAfm fetures 12 voices. These can be configured to 12 voices or a layer of two voices in 6 voice polyphony (where a pair of voices is split in a right and a left output) or in unison mode. A fourth mode let the operator #3 of each voices not to track the played note for special FM sounds.

It is well built. The housing is all metal. The knobs are fixed to the housing by a nut. Having a dedicated knob and slider for most parameters is a big plus. It allows you to experiment more with the FM nature of sound design.

This synth is not the right one if you are looking for the classic DX-7 alike FM bell and piano sounds. It is more dirty and more grainy soundwise. And many parameters allow a parameter range of 8 to 32 values only.

But why is it impossible to dump or export a single sound via MIDI SysEx? These functions are always dumping 50 sounds a time of the 400 available memory slots (4 banks of preset 0-99).