Ace quality in Zebra

[tansu]

How we would kill to have the sound quality of Ace in Zebra??

My suggestion would be to have quality options in Zebra, like in Ace. I understand the added quality comes at a serious CPU hit and that is an acceptable trade-off for me. So having quality options would allow users to decide how much they are willing to sacrifice for the sake of superior quality.

[lazerkind]

Well, You could always try to oversampling Zebra when rendering.

What part of Zebra do you think needs to sound better?
//L

[Nielzie]

I think Zebra 2.5 sounds great on it's own. It's just different imo. And I love it's lightweightness on the cpu.

[bmrzycki]

This is highly unlikely to make it into Zebra anytime soon. The internal architecture of ACE and Zebra are fundamentally at odds. Urs designed ACE from the ground up to work in this way. In his own words:

ACE is basically one big module like the ones in Zebra. All the parts of ACE are integrated in a single process which allows for very *fast* interaction. This is very cpu demanding though. You can't do anything too complicated. You're rewarded on the other hand with modulations that are otherwise only possible (or should we say, bearable) in analog gear.

Zebra on the other end consists of loads of modules which are highly insulated from each other. There's no interaction except for control rate modulation, audio signal flow and modulation matrix. This allows Zebra to be extraordinarily flexible and complex at a relatively small cpu footprint.

In that way, ACE and Zebra are on the two ends of the digital world (just like they're on the two ends of the alphabet).

Does Zebra benefit form ACE? - Yes it does. The development of ACE (and Bazille/Berlin Modular) forced me into learning, analysing and eventually building analogue circuits. I have a whole desk full of books, Resistors, Caps, Transistors, OpAmps, OTAs, Breeding Boards and what not. The outcome is this: The most powerful filter I've ever written is the new XMF in Zebra 2.5. That one is the superset of the one in ACE (see XMF video on YouTube). Everything is somehow related to everything else somehow.

[tansu]

ACE has a strong powerful quality even without any serious amounts of modulations applied, this immediate powerful quality is missing from Zebra (which still sounds lovely tho)

Its that superior sound quality that everyone is raving about in ACE is what I dream of in Zebra.

It would be interesting to have Urs comment on quality in Zebra vs ACE, minus the obvious audio rate modulation capabilities of ACE.

Ofcourse i'm not expecting him to come out in public and say one of his plugs sound better than the other... but this is an interesting topic never the less.

[pdxindy]

ACE has a strong powerful quality even without any serious amounts of modulations applied, this immediate powerful quality is missing from Zebra (which still sounds lovely tho)

Its that superior sound quality that everyone is raving about in ACE is what I dream of in Zebra.

It would be interesting to have Urs comment on quality in Zebra vs ACE, minus the obvious audio rate modulation capabilities of ACE.

Ofcourse i'm not expecting him to come out in public and say one of his plugs sound better than the other... but this is an interesting topic never the less.

cpu could not handle it... in some years when the cpu is 10x or more faster than now, then it could be possible... until then, just use ACE and Zebra together!

[fas1piano]

maybe i have overlooked something, but as far as i know, there should not be any difference in "sound quality" as long as you don't use audio rate modulation. zebra has the ACE filter, too, so:

maybe you could have been influenced by levels, the nice ACE gui, the impressive fm/modular sounds in ACE or you did not choose the same wave forms in zebra as in ACE...

there's is plenty of room to perceive as "better sound" ("warmer, fatter, more direct") what is essentialy a positive feeling towards an instrument. i suspect entire hardware companies make a living from these feelings and the fact that people "hear" the difference (hearing is very subjective without proper ABX testing).

[xh3rv]

... there should not be any difference in "sound quality" as long as ...

I think quotes around "sound quality" here really makes sense. Objective things can be said that relate ACE's audio-rate modulation to techniques used with other synths, but sound quality is ultimately a subjective thing. With ACE, the audio-rate modulation works in this subjective sense - it sounds good. Other synths do other things that sound good ... Zebra has as many ways of sounding good as anything out there.

[pdxindy]

maybe i have overlooked something, but as far as i know, there should not be any difference in "sound quality" as long as you don't use audio rate modulation. zebra has the ACE filter, too, so:

There is no control rate for regular modulations... Every modulation in ACE is audio rate or higher (assuming accurate setting)... that gives it a kind of liveliness and vitality that Zebra (or most any other synth) cannot match. Zebra has other qualities that I love, but ACE has something Zebra doesn't.

[lazerkind]

ACE has a strong powerful quality even without any serious amounts of modulations applied, this immediate powerful quality is missing from Zebra (which still sounds lovely tho)

Its that superior sound quality that everyone is raving about in ACE is what I dream of in Zebra.

Sound quality is such a subjective thing.
I would not say that either Zebra or Ace sounds better, but they do excel at different things. Also, due to their different structures they invite to different kinds of experimentation.

For me personally I can get the sounds I want quicker out of Zebra than from ACE.(But I may need more practice) The new filters in Zebra 2.5 are just lovely.

So if anything I'd say that ACE sounds too clean without lot's of modulation.
but I like my synths dirty and rough.
//L

[Urs]

Hmmm, oversampling Zebra would require not only more CPU power but also a rewrite of the SSE/AltiVec code that's almost everywhere. That is, many algorithms in Zebra are 32 bit by nature as that is what old SSE and AltiVec have offered. And of course, moving to 64 bit calculations requires SSE2 or later and can only operate on two pieces of data instead of four.

I suppose that once PowerPC can be ditched and 64 bit is common, I can indeed go that way.

But for now, ACE is ACE and Zebra is Zebra. I don't think at all that Zebra sounds worse than ACE, but ACE is simply very good at some punchy sounds.

Cheers,

Urs

[fas1piano]

if you don't have any kind of modulation within listening range in a patch - is there a difference because of higher modulation rates and/or oversampling in ACE?

e.g. are envelopes punchier in ACE (snappy mode) than the v-slope put to (more thann) exponential? or is there aliasing in a normal zebra oscillator? how would zebra benefit from oversampling? probably nothing i would hear anywy - i am just curious about the technology.

[Urs]

nothing i would hear

Well, it's subtle. Some say it's related to the looks of the gui

ACE's Sync sounds are definately better than Zebra's. The XMF in Zebra however does pretty much the same thing as the VCF in ACE. Slightly different topologies though because Zebra'S XMF is a bit more flexible and doesn't need audio rate resonance control (the XMF does do good quality audio rate FilterFM, but the input signal is not oversampled like in ACE - it's only upsampled, which shouldn't cause any harm)

Urs

[fas1piano]

thanks, urs. i'll check the synth sounds then - gonna be fun. i already noticed that i like ACE sync better than sync on my creamware prodyssey ASB box. ACE sync sounds clearer, less noisy.