Except no analogue instrument (including acoustic ones) has perfect tuning. This is most obvious in string instruments like a violin, where the pitch is determined by the where the violinist places his finger, no two violinists are going to hit exactly the same pitch every time, and that's before they start applying vibrato.pustekuchen wrote:
There are no "detuning knobs" in a classical symphony orchestra. You know...?
And you can be sure: they tuned their instruments perfectly before starting the concert!!! Otherwise the conductor would be very angry and those musicians carriere could find an end quickly that way ...
It's these small differences in pitch that give the richness you hear in a large orchestra, similarly it's the small differences in pitch between voices in a an analogue synthesizer (that exist even if you haven't applied any intentional detuning) that give the richness that people associate with the unison effect.
Of course in a digital synthesizer you can get perfect pitch matching between voices, but since would result in unvarying phase cancellations between voices it would as somebody has already pointed out be no different to simply using a different wavetable... unless there are non linearities in the signal path, where processing two different waveforms in parallel and then mixing them might well sound different to mixing before processing. However though this might be useful for generating certain tones, it certainly wouldn't generate the warmth and movement that most people associate with unison.
Urs
