Here is a short comparison of the square wave in a few synthesizers. As good as the sound is, I find that SynthMaster's synthesis has room for improvement and I would like to have some input by kv331 about this.
I tried to generate a pure square wave, removing all possible effects on each synthesizer. I am no expert at any of these synthesizers, so I hope I didn't overlook something. If I did, I will be glad to correct this post.
Tyrell N6
Some overshoot on the up front, but none on the down front.
Diva demo (preset Jupiter 8 )
No overshoot or undershoot.
SynthMaster 2.7 ("best" quality)
osc2 is off, and both osc1 & osc2 on layer 2 are off. Global effects are off too.
The spot on the down front is a display artefact, as will be seen below.
Novation V-Station
The signal is a perfect Fourier sum.
Zooming in,
V-station:
SynthMaster:
We can see that the waveshape is made of triangles on SynthMaster, rather than sinusoids.
This gives the impression that the sampling rate is lower on SynthMaster than on V-station (this is in "best" quality). It also has some phase distortions, while V-station's square wave is perfectly symmetric, meaning only pair harmonics.
To be clear, my intention here is certainly not to bash SynthMaster, which is my main synthesizer. But since kv331 has a thread asking for improvements on v3, I think that sound quality is the most important improvement that could be made and concentrating his efforts on it is worthwhile.
I have a feeling that square wave shows a lot about how oscillators generate waveshapes, and that the purer they are, the better the sound will be down the audio effects chain, as there will be less unwanted harmonics, especially when signals are mixed and matched.
Even though I don't expect the synthesis to match that of Diva, let alone a perfect square wave, I wish it was at least as good as V-station.
