This was me too, pretty much exactly. In fact, I think I liked 4 best right off the bat before I tried to break things. To be fair, that wasn't very long.Vesius wrote:Under less extreme settings, I still favoured 4. Although, I'd be the first to throw my hands up and say that could be confirmation bias as it was done after the extreme stuff. My natural response was to push it, and push it hard in all the ways I know digital filters struggle.
The reason I still preferred 4 was the resonance. I felt it 'sat' in the sound best - that is to say around the point of self-resonance it seemed most like it was 'in' the sound, rather than pasted on top of the sound. Interestingly, under those conditions, 1 put up a much stronger showing ... and those settings were relevant in my poll choice. I'm just an old war dog and know what I'm looking for and how to establish that very quickly - which doesn't mean of course that it's the best option for anyone else, or that it's technically the 'best' choice! 2 suffered here as there were points where it seemed to lose bass response. 3 did OK as did 5. But maybe I'd already been put off 3 and 5 because of the extreme tests.
That's my thought process as I'm conscious of it.
I do a test on every synth that has audio rate filter modulation. Take a square wave and crank it, while on osc 2 (or 3 if it's a Mini type emulation) make it a sine or triangle an octave down from osc 1 and have it modulate the cutoff. Then start experimenting on the resonance and listening to it all at different cutoff settings and at different octaves. #4 fared really well next to my Prophet 6 which I was doing identical things to throughout the process. Up until now, the only native software synths that really seem to do this well have been Monark/Blocks and Roland's System 100. I didn't have time to put it up against John Bowen's ProTone, but I will tomorrow if I get the chance. Today was a bit of a s-show... Literally (I have an almost potty trained 2 year old 
) and we've got house guests coming who are expecting to live in my studio so I'm scrambling to make things nice, but I'll try.Hey Urs. Can you spare a moment? Thanks.
The Pro 1 is a nice classic synth and I'm all for a good software version, but, what would really make me hit the PayPal account would be something that lived in that world and the world that the Pro 2 lives in. Smith's been all about digital oscillators for a long time and frankly I've got analog synths that RePro might equal, but what I don't have is say some cool wavetable engine, like the one in Zebra with that kick ass filter and CEM modeled socks. Now that would be a no-brainier and I think few would slight you if you literally just lifted that tech out of Zebra and made it an oscillator option. I suggest this because the original Prophet VS waves would be cool, but probably protected by a copywrite.
I do know that what struck me (and others, zerocrossing I think) was how some of the filters (3 and 4) seemed to interact with the oscs in a peculiar and very nice sounding way. I do not know if this makes it analog, but it is certainly something I am looking for. The other time I noticed the importance of such a thing was when I heard comparisons between a real 303 and soft emulations. The hardware filter had an interaction with the oscs that the soft equivalent did not. That made a huge difference. Moreover, the fact that 3 behaves very well across the whole spectrum of modulation depth is really a deal maker 
