Daichi Laboratory (Ichiro Toda)

Pretty much everyone knows this is one of the most efficient heavy lifters. Lots of sound with minimal tweaking, hundreds of thousands of presets around. The real deal that some must not get is the QUALITY of the sound. Very few synths have achieved as high of a quality of sound, perceptually or even on a scope. Don't know how they did it but me and a gazillion others have used it in production environments for decades with great results. What makes it shine is the sound quality, ease of tweaking, arpeggiation and unison features. The only deficit is that it is ugly, and I wouldn't want it any other way. The few that have come close for sound quality are some of U-he's synths and Vital. Yes, there are new and interesting avenues worth pursuing (like additive synthesis, sample based, and hybrid synths), but this is hands down the best subtractive synth I've used.

Aside what the previous review by meru was. Does she need glasses or is her computer strange. I found nothing valid in her review. Synth1 is not overrated and is perhaps the most popular free synth out there and has been for years. Everything, at least on my computer is easy to see and adjust and has it's own unique sound. What to speak of the thousands of available banks for this great synth. The complaint that the Gui is ugly is hardly a valid point as it can be make very nice looking with adjustable custom colours and the fonts are clear. In her review he does not recommend any free synths that could be comparable. That would be a plus if it were so. At any rate she is no doubt in the minority on this. Long live Synth1.

It's a good (albeit overrated) synth with an extremely messy, ugly GUI (not talking about the color).

I give it a generous 3 stars because it sounds OK and the plugin is one of the most CPU efficient.
However, functionally it's just one of the thousands of generic subtractive plugins, but the GUI is among the worst i've seen in this category.

- There's a lack of space, around the visual controls and also between some labels.
- Combine that with ridiculous abbreviations, and you get gems such as "timedephatefdbktoned/w"
- The knobs are not aligned.
- The 'm.env' and 'dest.' buttons aren't aligned either...
- The 'phase' knob label is a different size.
- The monospace font makes the fonts harder to read.
- The only point for using monospace today, is aligning words and characters, yet many labels are vertically misaligned.

But hey, at least you can change the color...

Conclusion: Unless you're using a very old computer, and need an extremely low-CPU synth (which is the only remarkable feature), there's nothing you would miss using one of the many subtractive synths with more features and better GUIs - some of which are free (check out TAL NoiseMaker, u-he Tyrell N6, or even better, Vital!).

I could be niggly and knock off one star because this doesn't sound "hi fi" in terms of raw audio quality, but I can't knock a free synth that has literally thousands of presets that sound fantastic. I am simply blown away by the number of presets for this thing (I know there was a contest to make stuff with this synth), but I downloaded one file that has 16,000 presets (a link to a 25,000 preset mega download is apparently down). I'm not a fan of the dated-looking GUI; it would be great if this could be updated with a graphical presentation that matched the awesomeness of this synth. A must-have.

Still the gold standard for a free synth VST. Would definitely recommend to learn how to program synths. I'm very sad so I used the colour editor to make it look like a Nord Lead.

Sadly completely buggy / unusable as 64-bit version, at least on macos. No bugfix for this since 2015. Very sad. That's why I giving now only a single star, sorry.

In detail:
- Filter doesn't work in the 64-bit version
- Preset manager doesn't properly work
- GUI doesn't properly work

Workaround for macos users (until Apple removed any 32-bit support from the OS):

- Strip away the 64-bit part from the universal binary using the terminal command "ditto". Search Hanz Meyzer's post here in the forum.
- Do a plugin rescan in your DAW

it resets to the first preset when i press my spacebar so 3/5 otherwise would of been 4, if i can figure out how to fix it i'll give 4.

It's amazing but the latest mac version has a broken 12db slope lp filter and I wish I could download an earlier version.