Serum was specifically designed to have low noise floor:telecode wrote: ↑Mon Nov 16, 2020 10:41 aminteresting that pigments has a dirtier noise floor. but really, all that matters is does it sound good and does it feel good to use.JO512 wrote: ↑Sun Nov 15, 2020 10:08 pmI did an A/B comparison of Pigments and Serum just now with the same wavetables, no filters, and no FX, and with normalized volume, just to see if I could tell any difference in the oscillators. I could not at first hear an obvious difference. But I looked at them on a spectrum analyzer and did find a visible difference. The signal from Pigments is dirtier, with a noisier floor. And as I really listened closely while watching the spectrum analyzer, I began to hear a difference. I wonder if the Pigments oscillators are aliasing and if that "dirt" is the foldover coming back down from the Nyquist limit. It looks like it. With a pure saw, I noticed that Pigments sounds a little darker and a tiny bit muddier, but perhaps a bit warmer. The difference is slight! You'd likely never notice it without very close, isolated listening. The difference is more obvious on an analyzer with a square or triangle wave than a saw, since the gaps between the odd harmonics are bigger.
I am not worried about it though, as I tend to dirty up my signals on purpose anyway!
Now, many people call it "sterile" Can't satisfy everyone, it seems.ULTRA-CLEAN OSCILLATORS
Playback of wavetables requires digital resampling to play different frequencies. Without considerable care and a whole lot of number crunching, this process will create audible artifacts. Artifacts mean that you are (perhaps unknowingly) crowding your mix with unwanted tones / frequencies. Many popular wavetable synthesizers are astonishingly bad at suppressing artifacts - even on a high-quality setting some create artifacts as high as -36 dB to -60 dB (level difference between fundamental on artifacts) which is well audible, and furthermore often dampening the highest wanted audible frequencies in the process, to try and suppress this unwanted sound. In Serum, the native-mode (default) playback of oscillators operates with an ultra high-precision resampling, yielding an astonishingly inaudible signal-to-noise (for instance, -150 dB on a sawtooth played at 1 Khz at 44100)! This requires a lot of calculations, so Serum’s oscillator playback has been aggressively optimized using SSE2 instructions to allow for this high-quality playback without taxing your CPU any more than the typical (decent quality) soft synth already does. Load up Serum and we think you’ll be able to notice both what you hear (solid high frequencies, extending flat all the way up to the limits of hearing) as well as what you don’t hear (no unwanted mud or aliasing gibberish- just good, clean sound).