KVR Audio

T-CM11 · Post by **T-CM11** » Tue Mar 18, 2014 8:44 pm

ghettosynth wrote: Nobody wants to talk about their DCOs because they have that ugly digital in their name.

Projecting much? There's nothing inherently 'ugly' about digital.

ghettosynth · Post by **ghettosynth** » Tue Mar 18, 2014 9:56 pm

T-CM11 wrote:
ghettosynth wrote: Nobody wants to talk about their DCOs because they have that ugly digital in their name.
Projecting much? There's nothing inherently 'ugly' about digital.

Confused much? I'm implying that the word is ugly, not the technology. Manufacturers of analog synths like to avoid using the word. They dance around it like it has the plague ,instead, trotting out pointless phrases such as "all analog signal path" as if that's the only thing that matters in an analog synth.

T-CM11 · Post by **T-CM11** » Tue Mar 18, 2014 10:05 pm

Sure you can comment on what they're saying, but you have no idea why. Unless you're a mind reader, or have a copy of their strategic marketing plan.

Aural Chaos · Post by **Aural Chaos** » Tue Mar 18, 2014 10:34 pm

I think the point is pretty clear- companies are not going to brag about their synth being "nearly all analog". Doesn't necessarily mean they are being deceptive, they aren't hiding the information, but they aren't going to put it front and center either.

ghettosynth · Post by **ghettosynth** » Tue Mar 18, 2014 11:15 pm

Aural Chaos wrote:I think the point is pretty clear- companies are not going to brag about their synth being "nearly all analog". Doesn't necessarily mean they are being deceptive, they aren't hiding the information, but they aren't going to put it front and center either.

I guess this depends on what you mean by deception. I think some companies have less need for such marketing practices and I respect them more. You're free to draw your own conclusions, however, if you sell a DCO and you think that there's nothing wrong with, or even an advantage to, using a DCO instead of a VCO, then why wouldn't you tout the advantages or your DCO? This was never a problem in the 80s when digital wasn't a dirty word, my PG-300 clearly says DCO above the single digital oscillator controls.

These days companies selling DCO based analogs seem to go out of their way to discuss the properties of their DCOs but choose to, incorrectly, refer to them as analog oscillators. To me, that's misleading, even deceptive.

As an all-new, all-analogue synthesizer design, Pulse 2 flawlessly delivers exactly what synth connoisseurs around the world have been truly craving for quite some time — three analogue oscillators living in perfect harmony with a VCF (VoltageControlled Filter),

Really, "All-Analogue", no, it's not an "all-analogue" design. No, of course it doesn't say "three VCOS", but they don't refer to their oscillator as hybrid, or DCO either, even though that's exactly what it is. Moreover, "connoisseurs around the world have been truly craving" a DCO based synth? Really?

As I point out on my blog, the analog components of a DCO do not "oscillate" without the pulses provided by the "digital" oscillator. The most generous description that is still honest is "digitally controlled oscillator"; still correct is "hybrid oscillator." An "analogue oscillator", it is not.

At least hypersynth doesn't call their oscillators "all analogue", they simply refer to them as oscillators. They are well implemented DCOs, however, but they're still DCOs.

Tom Oberheim doesn't need to resort to such tricky language, his synths are "all analogue" as "connoisseurs" mean the word, as are Moogs.

Numanoid · Post by **Numanoid** » Sat Jul 25, 2015 6:01 pm

Anybody using this, at over €1000 it is pricey...

IncarnateX · Post by **IncarnateX** » Sat Jul 25, 2015 9:20 pm

Holy hallucination!!!

Has the question of that analog magic really been cooked down to whether the OSCs are voltage or digitally controlled? Don't anyone remember how Klaus Schulze found it a PITA that he constantly had to tune his minimoog on stage or how New Order didn't give a shit and entered the scene with synths that weren''t even tuned from the outset and just got worse during the show?
The DCO was nothing less of a revolution at that time and now the spoiled youth keeps bragging about it even though they wouldn't pass a blind test between softsynths and analogs with a gun pointed to their forehead?

You are lucky to have tuned synths ! When I was a lad there were a hundred and fifty of us living in t' shoebox in t' middle o' road listening to detuned synths twentyfour hours a day.

And you try and tell the young people of today that ..... they won't believe you.

IncarnateX · Post by **IncarnateX** » Sat Jul 25, 2015 9:57 pm

.....hate that edit tab being so close to the quote...put the shit in each their corner plz!

IncarnateX · Post by **IncarnateX** » Sun Aug 16, 2015 9:02 am

Heh. I found room for a little Volca Bass on top of my JP8000. Since it has VCOs I guess that I got myself a REAL analog synth now or what? Any technical based objections to that?

At least I found this quote in the manual for the Volca Keys:

If you feel the pitch has drifted, please stop the sound for about 10 seconds. volca' auto-tuning function will correct itself automatically.

Well that sounds familiar with regard to "real" analogs, doesn't it

For the record Volca Bass is a pretty dirty synth but can be tamed and polished with the right settings. It has three detunable OSCs, with saw or square to choose from, so you can make 3 octaved fat bass sounds that some of the two VCO/DCOs analogs mentioned here cannot compete with

Numanoid · Post by **Numanoid** » Wed Aug 03, 2016 4:58 pm

Reviewed at 8.0 in Future Music 308 (Sept 2016)

Did they take a year to get round doing it, or has it not been released before recently?

Hypersynth Xenophone Analog Monosynth