Why even modern VST Synths can't sound like 20 year-old Hardware VA Synths?

[jeffb01]

Wait. You can't make a wavetable of a supersaw. That's silly. It has to be one note. right?

[zerocrossing]

Why even modern VST Synths can't sound like 20 year-old Hardware VA Synths?

Blind listening test or stfu.

Seriously, someone please post the audio from a 20 year old synth, and also post audio from a (good) VST emulation (like Arturia or similar). Both though the same signal chain. But DON"T TELL US WHICH IS WHICH.

Let see how the armchair experts fare.

I was just about to post something along these exact words. 100 or so GearSlutz members who spend most of their days pondering the difference in the natural drift of a VCO made in 1978 and the algorithmic drift of an emulated VCO made in 2018, couldn’t come to a clear consensus as to the difference between Diva and an OB-8, and you think that in blind test someone is going to pick out two similar VAs? Unlikely. Unless you’re looking for aliasing, then it should be easy to see which one the Virus is.

Truthfully, the Virus is a fine synth. It was the pinnacle of technology in its time. It’s still a good synth, but please stop saying things like modern plugins sound “thin.” That’s just f’n bullsh!t. Both Massive X and Dune 3 both have filters that are like elephant testicles compared to the monkey balls on the Virus. Now you may like monkey balls, and there’s a lot of monkeys who swear by them, but when you’re talking about pure volume of testicular tissue, the monkey can’t compete.

All that isn’t coming from someone who’s denounced hardware. I’ve got a dozen hardware synths sitting in the next room. I kept hearing the “Oh man, the TI is so amaaaaaazing!” So I listened to every demo I could get my hands on.. and they all seemed mediocre to me. Not one excited me, until I ran across a Youtube demo that focused on the wavetable functions. I was impressed. Sounded pretty damn good to me, so I went for a Snow. When I got it in my studio, I was impressed with the wavetables... but ultimately they were nothing special. Just wavetables. The format-tables and grain-tables... not that amazing. Nothing compared to the wavetable functions of Serum or Icarus. The filters were actually where I felt it was weakest. Just kind of cold and clinical. Great for that 00s Trance sound, but that’s not me. In the end, I made a bunch of cool presets for it. Despite my criticism, I did get greats sounds out of it. But when I went back to my go-to software VA, I instantly thought, “oh, this is going back on eBay.”

[BONES]

Nicely put and completely accurate in my experience. As someone said earlier, it's only because the hardware came first and we are always trying to match our VSTi to the hardware that we seem to fail. But imagine trying to make a Virus sound like DUNE or Thorn or Serum. You might get close but it would always be just that little bit different, which people would no doubt then pounce on to say that software is better, if only people had the same attachment to their VSTi that they have to their hardware.

Wait. You can't make a wavetable of a supersaw. That's silly. It has to be one note. right?

I think you mean one cycle and it is not just possible, but easy. You just need to modulate the wavetable position to get the movement you get naturally from a supersaw oscillator.

[phreaque]

It is so possible to make a wavetable of supersaw.
And the unique thing about it, the speed of wavetable (frame rate / position) controls how detuned the supersaw.

[DJ Warmonger]

Wait. You can't make a wavetable of a supersaw.

Nope you can't, as detuned supersaw is an aperiodic waveform. Wavetable only allows to run a single oscillator, so you need 7 of them.

[excuse me please]

Most people won't hear any difference. I assume these are the same kind of people who would deny - by high and by low - their favorite bands were using a drum computer in the 80s. They would say stuff like "the drummer drums pretty tight" att.
Why bother anyway? Consider yourself being part of the audio elite

[JCJR]

As someone already mentioned, sound is not the only or even primary reason why some prefer hardware.

Maybe tedious thread drift to yet again belabor the list of non-sound reasons. Everything has to sound like something. I dont know modern sw synths good enough to have opinion. Even if they sound "better" than hardware then there are those non-sound reasons keeping me from being real interested in plugin synths.

However latency might influence some folks perception of tone or whatever. For example if you have a low latency snappy response to a keyboard the keyboard mechanism may be perceived aa crisp tight and fast. Use the same keyboard to drive high latency mushy sounds and the same keyboard mechanism may feel sloppy and mushy.

For a realtime player, just changing the latency and note-start jitter could change the player's timbre perception even if the synth timbre is unchanged. Human sensorium is easily fooled.

This difference in subjective keyboard feel would be completely lost by a double-blind listener test. If you have two virrually identical sounds except one of them has 2 ms latency and the other has 40 ms latency, the listener wont hear sonic difference or feel the gratification of the 2 ms response vs the maddening "playing a jello keyboard" feel of a high latency but otherwise sonically identical version.

Some modern music styles do not involve much or àny real time playing. Practitioners of those styles might never notice latency issues and the sound is all that matters.

I'm not saying that low latency softsynths are impossible but I never had a computer setup capable of stable low latency low jitter real time playthru.

It has always been enough latency to ruin my fun. I gave up trying. Sure its probably possible but hardware is more ergonomic for me and has low enough latency built-in.

So the latency doesnt really matter unless a person prefers to play in real time and he finds jitter and latency annoying.

[recursive one]

Wait. You can't make a wavetable of a supersaw.

Nope you can't, as detuned supersaw is an aperiodic waveform. Wavetable only allows to run a single oscillator, so you need 7 of them.

It is possible to make wavetables of supersaws where the "aperiodic" qualities will be embedded into the sequence of frames in a wavetable, you can then control WT position to similate detune to an extent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zytMfFQksHc

It's quite an awkward way to make supersaws and it will likey sound different to a "real" supersaw consisting of several saw waves sunning in parallel, but it's technically possible.

two synths that are far more similar than they are different. e.g. I can see how you might not wat to buggerise about patching up an FM synth in PhasePlant but I can't see much that's different between Serum and Spire, which makes me think it probably does come down to presets.

It seems you are not very familiar with these two synths or with sound-design in general. Where is a wavetable editor in Spire? Or where is a arp in Serum and how do you distribute an oscillator output between two parallel filters in it? Just to give a couple of examples. Not to say they sound quite different, the filters and effects in Spire sound nothing like the filters and effects in Serum.

[BONES]

Wait. You can't make a wavetable of a supersaw.

Nope you can't, as detuned supersaw is an aperiodic waveform. Wavetable only allows to run a single oscillator, so you need 7 of them.

No, as I explained, you just need multiple frames within the wavetable, then you modulate the WT Position to create the correct effect. It's probably how Roland did it in the first place and almost certainly how Access do it.

However latency might influence some folks perception of tone or whatever. For example if you have a low latency snappy response to a keyboard the keyboard mechanism may be perceived aa crisp tight and fast. Use the same keyboard to drive high latency mushy sounds and the same keyboard mechanism may feel sloppy and mushy.

You do realise that many hardware synths have significantly higher latency than most modern DAWs, right? Scott Solida did a huge test on his dungeon full of hardware and found the average latency to be in the region of 19ms, if I remember correctly. It's just something people don't think occurs in hardware synths so they don't look for it. We run at about 20ms on stage, just so we aren't over-stressing our system, and that's plenty for my bandmate to play drums in time with the sequencer. i.e. To trigger drum sounds from Battery, which is running in Orion along with everything else, with no noticeable latency.

It's quite an awkward way to make supersaws and it will likey sound different to a "real" supersaw consisting of several saw waves sunning in parallel

Actually, AFAIK the original supersaw was just a single waveform designed to mimic 7 saw oscillators slightly out of tune. I had always assumed it was done with a wavetable but it may not have been.

Where is a wavetable editor in Spire?

If I ever need to edit a wavetable, you have my permission to shoot me dead. I can't imagine anything more tedious or less musical. next you'll be expecting me to draw my own sawtooth waves.

Or where is a arp in Serum and how do you distribute an oscillator output between two parallel filters in it?

Cubase has several arps, as does my KeyStep, and I can load as many instances as I need to, in order to achieve any effect I like. You seem to lack the imagination to be creative. Pretty big problem in a creative endeavour, I imagine.

Not to say they sound quite different, the filters and effects in Spire sound nothing like the filters and effects in Serum.

I bet I can make them sound exactly the same. Again, you seem to lack imagination.

[recursive one]

Actually, AFAIK the original supersaw was just a single waveform designed to mimic 7 saw oscillators slightly out of tune. I had always assumed it was done with a wavetable but it may not have been.

The Super Saw oscillator present in the Roland synthesizers is created by layering seven sawtooth
oscillators, and tuning their frequency apart from each other by a set amount

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/1852/2 ... 68a251.pdf

If I ever need to edit a wavetable, you have my permission to shoot me dead. I can't imagine anything more tedious or less musical.

You seem to lack the imagination to be creative.

Huh?

[trusampler]

it's all about the experience you have to make it sound good.

Plus these newer Synths sound amazing and in some cases just as good as analog and va's all day long.

[fmr]

Plus these newer Synths sound amazing and in some cases just as good as analog and va's all day long.

Better (IMO)

[DJ Warmonger]

It's probably how Roland did it in the first place

Roland? When? With JP-8000? Sorry, but no:
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/1852/2 ... 68a251.pdf

It's quite an awkward way to make supersaws and it will likey sound different to a "real" supersaw consisting of several saw waves sunning in parallel

If it's quite different, it's not the same. Check original post ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

You cannot simulate aperiodic waveforms with finite number of frames, you're either run into phase issues or create hard sync where there was none.

[JCJR]

However latency might influence some folks perception of tone or whatever. For example if you have a low latency snappy response to a keyboard the keyboard mechanism may be perceived aa crisp tight and fast. Use the same keyboard to drive high latency mushy sounds and the same keyboard mechanism may feel sloppy and mushy.

You do realise that many hardware synths have significantly higher latency than most modern DAWs, right? Scott Solida did a huge test on his dungeon full of hardware and found the average latency to be in the region of 19ms, if I remember correctly. It's just something people don't think occurs in hardware synths so they don't look for it. We run at about 20ms on stage, just so we aren't over-stressing our system, and that's plenty for my bandmate to play drums in time with the sequencer. i.e. To trigger drum sounds from Battery, which is running in Orion along with everything else, with no noticeable latency.

Hi Bones if you can provide links will try find time to read them. I found this article https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques ... rt-1#para2 authored by Martin Walker, a short quote from the article:

It seemed sensible to start by measuring the delay between MIDI Note On data and the audio output of a few hardware synths to provide some useful comparisons with their software counterparts, so I started by plumbing in my old Korg M1. Like most hardware synths, this provides a consistent and fairly low delay that I measured at 3.2ms, which seems very good considering its 16-note polyphony. Another industry standard is Roland's JV1080, which turned in a rock-solid but slightly higher timing of 4.4ms, no doubt due to its 64-note polyphony.

Those figures are comparable to typical measurements I got some years earlier using a "pre-computer audio" simple diy quirky interface box and some code running on a toaster mac, results and design details published in some ancient Keyboard Magazine article. Can't recall the year.

Martin Walker's measurement method, I first saw in a mag article by Craig Anderton, audio-recording the MIDI to one computer audio channel and the synth output to another computer audio channel. It is a better easier method than the one I used, but when I made mine not many people had audio-capable computers, and I certainly didn't have one at that time.

Dunno typical MIDI delays of modern hardware synths. The old ones I measured went from 1 ms for an Alesis HR-16 drum machine to about 12 ms on some early Kawai synths. IIRC DX7 was in the ballpark of 3 or 4 ms. Some synths in stack mode were dogs. A stack on a Roland D50 could go as high as 20 or more ms, and program stacks on some others got kinda high. Apparently some of those early beasts had a fixed time delay for starting each voice so if you started up a 4 program stack it could take up to 4 times longer than starting up a single voice.

Maybe some hardware synths are real sloppy with latency but the ones I have are not. If I had a high-latency hardware synth it would probably bother me enough to get rid of it.

[BONES]

Scott published his findings here at KVR. Feel free to go searching for it yourself.