Just wondering from the people that have experience using them - do hardware VA's like Nord, Alesis, Access Virus, Roland etc... tend to suffer form aliasing in the upper register similarly to VSTi's that aren't oversampled?

Thanks,

YES

Not all of them. Yamaha AN1x has almost no aliasing even when playing hardsync sounds very high. John Bowen Solaris works at 96kHz, so it also has almost indiscernibly low amounts of aliasing. Korg Kronos VA engines are the same - very clean sound and very very low on aliasing.

Nord Lead, Virus, V-Synth, they all alias much worse than those I stated above. Especially V-Synth.

Not all software aliases badly

What does the aliasing you are talking about sound like? Any examples?

Hardware synthesizers alias to varying degrees, and in many cases if a software synthesizer aliased as much there would be jeering and scoffing, but people kid themselves about their hardware synths (which have latency, too, another thing never talked about). The low-level noise and phase smearing that are inevitable when taking a digital synth out through an analog cable and amplifier also mitigate the effect of artifacts- anyone can turn their softsynths into hardware by using a dedicated computer or in/out system and treating them as hardware.

Digital synthesizers may also be made to have effectively zero aliasing except when aliasing is desired for some reason. I don't know if any hardware synths have the horsepower to do this without severely limiting audio-rate modulation possibilities.

I only have AN1x here, but currently no means of recording it.

It is really insignificant in the big picture (playing live, for example). Yamaha's engineers really did wonders to do away with aliasing on the AN1x.

NO for a very good reason. All software is coded differently. They are not the same. As Urs pointed out some alias badly, some not at all, some little etc.etc.

Depends on internal sample rates, use of band limited filters and the DAC to name a few factors

So what you are basically saying is that none of you have any idea what it actually is..

I know what aliasing is and how it sounds. It's somewhat similar to ringmodulation, because when you cross over the Nyquist limit (half the sample rate), the frequencies crossing over are aliased to the low frequency range, which generates unwanted sidebands in your sound.

Here's an example of aliasing of synced square wave on a Kurzweil PC3:

https://www.box.com/shared/bybb60ja3y


AN1x doesn't have this lower frequency ringing aliasing noise with synced square wave played this high at all.
Last edited by EvilDragon on Mon Nov 19, 2012 3:44 am; edited 2 times in total

No,only you said this. We do have idea what actually is but we are trying to be simple as can be simple. Question is very relative and depend on company which produce gear, particular model of an instrument, then we can debate why it does or does not alias and there is really a lot of factors to it.

What do you can't understand from other people posts?

Yes, the software in hardware synths is coded differently. The hardware is usually very similar though (typically Freescale/Motorola DSP chips). In theory, you could plug the Virus C code into a Supernova II...of course it would only use one of the ~9 or so DSP chips since that's all the C had.

...but different languages don't change the universal realities of DSP such as Nyquist and aliasing.

Of course not in the same way as they don't limit particular DSP developer to produce own clever algorithm to fight with this limitation