I used to have SY 85 back in 90s and I really loved it. I miss some of its sounds nowadays. Is there a way to get the original wafeform into MoXF format and load it into flash module?

The short answer is No.

The SY85 is so far removed from the current Yamaha Synth engines (even on the AWM2 side of things, SY85 was a sampled based synth from the early 1990’s) there is no compatibility between them. The keepers of the Yamaha Sample libraries have, over the years, kept up with popular sounds. how they get used, customer favorites, etc. you will need to trust that the good sounds survived the W-series, the EX-Series, and the S-Series to make it to the Motif-Series (which became the soundset of a generation of Sample based Synthesizers).

So if you think about synth evolution every thing we at Yamaha learned (or a whole lot of it) survives in the current crop of Sample based synths. Compatibility for the MOXF extends to the Motif XF.
Compatibility for the MONTAGE extends to Motif ES, Motif XS, Motif XF, MOXF, S90 XS/S70 XS, DX7, TX7, DX7II, TX802, TX816

The entire Wave ROM of the old SY85 was a whooping 6MB of Data.
6 Million... That sounds like a lot only when talking 6 million of dollars... but by today’s standards for samples the SY85 is just slightly out of step...
By comparison the MOXF, literally has more than 120 times the Wave ROM @ 741MB
The MONTAGE by contrast has more than 945 times the SY85 Wave ROM.

And while an argument can be made for “size is not everything”, but in this case, the difference in quality and playability is truly more than the twenty-five years that have passed. You’ll have to trust Yamaha that we’ve stayed on top of the popular sounds...

Thank you for your kind explanation, Phil!

I saw a guy on YT playnig the SY85 and it sounded great! That piano sound! Very distinctive and awesome, I remember it!

6MB of Rom? Wow. I am a teacher and we have a Roland keyboard which has 32 MB of samples and it sounds terrible. How did Yamaha do it? 6 MB vs. 32 MB?

I found a floppy disks set called "MegaPiano" for SY85... I don't even have the drive so it's useless for me.. 🙁

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!!

Cheers!!!

6MB of Rom? Wow. I am a teacher and we have a Roland keyboard which has 32 MB of samples and it sounds terrible. How did Yamaha do it? 6 MB vs. 32 MB?

It is all in the *how*... People who think all sampling techniques are the same, just don't know. You'd be amazed that a lot of so called Wave ROM stats in some synths are fluff (samples of silence). Yamaha's AWM2 process is highly efficient. That's as much as they are willing to share.

The well loved "Power Grand" from the Motif (classic) was famously compared to competing brand pianos that were several Gigabytes in size, yet it was only 2.4MB in size. Size does not guarantee the playable quality. It can help but if your initial data is GB but of poor quality or done at the wrong distance, or with the wrong microphones, or at the wrong velocity... etc., etc.

Back then sounds were highly (highly) efficient... they had to be... Yamaha uses much of the increase Wave ROM size nowadays to recreate more detail and nuance. They give the performer more options, more articulations, variations within the sound you are performing. On the piano, today we have enough WAVE ROM to include Key-Off noises, for example, in the acoustic piano sound sets. Back in 1992 it was just not done, too many other instruments needed to be covered. The original Motif (about 9-10 years after SY85) had a 84MB Wave ROM. 84MB of Yamaha Wave ROM, as many folks begin to get to know, is like several times what competing products deliver. You can like whatever you like (that is always allowed), but the Yamaha AWM2 sample based thing is an amazing tech.

If you look at how Yamaha is able to manipulate the 5.67GB of Wave ROM in the current day MONTAGE, you'll see how "smart" the ROM size is put to use in recreating instrument sounds. Combined with the pure synthesis FM-X engine and you have a synth with an extremely wide palette of sonic possibilities, and compatibility with more sounds than any synth in history! And that is pretty much a fact.

I recently loaded the sounds of the Motif ES into the MONTAGE, and I was amazed at how beautiful they sounded. I foundation myself describing it as the first time you saw a high definition television screen, and it is explained that the dark pixels are blacker making the color pop with more vibrancy... it is very much like that, the silences around the audio "pixels" seem to make the sounds pop! It was a scary (good) earful. Now the Motif ES engine was only four AWM2 Elements... dropping those into a MONTAGE Performance was like starting with a beautifully cut diamond that you could now surround with a new setting (pun intended).

I know I work for the company but these things are what they are... Yamaha doesn't have to be your favorite (we can't be everyone's favorite for everything all the time), but we are in the conversation!

Happiest of holidays and looking forward to another new year!