I read earlier that some keyboard companies can get more out of 4mb than others. For example how do Roland manage to dedicate just 20mb to 3500 + sounds on their VA3...and yet it sounds ok. Is it really a question of how much mb a keyboard has or the talent of the keyboard manufacturer...

Confused rolandfan

Rolandfan,

Of course talent matters, one of the most important things are the samples, bigger doesn't necessarily mean better.
But of course, If you take two equally talented sound designers, and you let them both sample a Steinway piano, and one has to make a 64 mb piano sound and the other has to limit theirs to 8 mb, the 64 mb will obviously sound better.
So to answer your final question, I think it is a little of both.
A 1 mb piano sound won't sound impressive, but that doesn't mean a 1 Gb piano will.
Hope this helps,

Greetz ,
Marcel

how do Roland manage to dedicate just 20mb to 3500 + sounds on their VA3...and yet it sounds ok.

Answer: That's why it only sounds OK and not great.

Grandpa Doug

There are many ways of making sounds. If a sound is a layer then this has cost nothing in terms of extra memory but will cost you polyphony. Equally some sound "variations" may be the same same with different filtering or envelopes. Again, zero extra memory cost.

Lots of memory is not so necessary to sound "good" as to sound "realistic". One of the things that lots of memory allows you to do is to have long samples. Short samples must be looped to sustain--which can make them sound unrealistic. Long samples can have much more realistic decays. Another way to save memory is to use a single sample for a range of notes and use it for all velocities. However, this can detract from realism. Yamaha has some console keyboards with about 100MB for a piano-so that each note can have its own samples at five different volumes (velocities). But if you only need something that "sounds like" an acoustic piano, 1MB will do.

Note that analog synths and physical modeling synths do not need any sample ROM at all to sound good. But analog synths do not provide realistic emulations of acoustic instruments. Physical modeling synths can provide realistic emulations of some instruments, but rely on lots of processing power instead of sample ROM.