I'll have to look up some of the answers for you, but definitely there is a full PLG150-DX inside the DX200... The PLG150-series boards could be used in a wide variety of products over its almost ten year history... and in some cases special voices were developed for specific products. For example, the big keyboards that used the PLG150 boards usually had a special bank of sounds - the programming existed in the keyboard, it referenced the PL150 Board for the Element Waveform.

As far as I remember, the PLG150-DX board always contains the 912 basic sounds. Just how you would access these from the DX200 well, not having touched a DX200 in a decade, I'll have to look that up for you. If you are in the USA, call Customer Support, they may have a better memory than me.

Thank you, Bad Mister. I'm not in the USA, I'm in Lithuania. But it's good to know that there is full PLG150-DX in the DX200.

I guess there is something in the DX200 regarding the incoming MIDI signals, which changes the bank and patch numbers for PLG150-DX. Probably, some of these 912 patches are used for the 256 factory patches of DX200. Maybe, the bank and patch numbers of those big keyboards don't correspond to the original numbers of PLG150-DX as well? So, if 256 of 912 of PLG150-DX sounds are actually used in the DX200, the rest of them are possibly just discarded - but why Yamaha would do this?

It adds to the mystery that there is no reference to these 912 sounds (or 912-256=656) in the DX200 manual. Another mystery is that the PLG150-DX has 64 user patches while DX200 has 128...

Again, the same board was configured to do different things in different products. Banks can be 'local' to the product, for example, when placed in a Motif or Motif ES, a Motif Bank can access sounds resident on the PLG 150-DX, but it adds Motif Effects and controllers... that Bank would only be meaningful to Motif series product... while the source Waveform is from the PLG Board, the surrounding parameters are local to the product.

The DX200 has its own User Bank, the Voices in that Bank are a combination of the Voice parameters of the DX200 engine using the PLG150-DX as the source Waveform.

However, the basic Library of 912 FM sounds on that PLG150-DX are local to that board, the question is, does the DX200 have the ability to access them? If you took the PLG150-DX out of the DX200 and placed it in a different Modular Synthesis Plugin System product, that product may be able to do more with that same board.

This may sound strange but the various MSPS products that used the PLG150-DX addressed the DX Board Voice as if it were addressing a Sample. The host product could have a very sophisticated synth engine surrounding the Board Voice, like in the CS6X, S80, Motif, or it could be used in products that did not have as complex surrounding functions, like the MU, and computer card systems... this allowed Yamaha a way to cost effectively provide FM synthesis to wide spectrum of price points without really compromising the fundamental sound engine source.

I don't remember the DX200, I don't recall how the Voices were laid out, sorry. It's been a while. Are you sure you have the right MSB/LSB to recall them... they may well be in there and accessible. I'd have to lookup to see what kind of a surrounding Voice engine was in the DX200... I'm pretty sure it was designed for specific use case, (groove-box).

Yes, I know that the 256 PLG150-DX voices are the base of the DX200 patterns - they are fed to additional effects, made into sequences and complemented with the sequences of the AWM sounds of drums and basses.

I tried to use the MSBs and LSBs from the PLG150-DX manual to no avail. It seems that the host device dictates its own rules, which of PLG150-DX patches are accessible, and by which numbers, and which are not. Maybe the developers just didn't find the right place, where to put the rest of the card patches, in their general plan of 256 factory presets and 128 user patterns?

And so the rest of the PLG150-DX potential is locked here, which is pretty strange. Unless someone knows a hidden magic command to unlock it, by switching the DX200 to a "PLG150-DX mode"?

So I have to write to somebody from Yamaha in the USA. The folks there have helped me in the past. I bought it 15 years ago when I was there, it was the last item on the shelf, unpacked, and without the CD with software. They were kind enough to send me the CD by post (no wetransfer things at that time....). And it's only now when I need to access all the PLG150-DX patches at once, for one specific reason.

And the question is interesting by itself, isn't it?

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Ops: THIS is the site of Yamaha in America, my bad 🙂

All clear now, the lesson learned (in a somewhat hard way): it all really depends on the host device's ability to allocate banks and patches. Bigger keyboards have more memory slots to accommodate them; but put the PLG150-DX into hypothetical something which supports only 20 patches, and you will get only 20 out of 912...

I still have an old desktop PC which is otherwise unreliable, but has the SW1000XG seated in it. So I will pull out the PLG from the DX200, mount it on the SW1000XG, and the desktop PC will work as the source of PLG sounds, operated over MIDI from the laptop...

Thanks for your help in searching for the truth.