Repro-1 (out now)

[fmr]

FMR,
we talking about the PRO ONE.
This is not a perfect synth, its from the 80s

This is key. I don't think many are taking this into account. The pro one is a dirty synth with a very thumpy bottom end when running the filter envelope decay very fast. This only comes across with filters 1 & 2 for me. All the others take away that bottom end too quick when the filter's closing.

Maybe, but filter 1 distorts like hell at high resonance values (4 too, but 1 is the worst), and that's way far than "dirty". I don't believe the Pro-One would behave like that.

[beely]

All the others take away that bottom end too quick when the filter's closing.

I never had a Pro One (it was the monosynth I wanted back in the day, but was too expensive).

Instead, I got a Moog Prodigy (which hopefully Urs will be tackling next because the hardsync sound is the nastiest dirtiest sync around and would I'm sure be a super-fun modelling experiment ) and the bottom end of the Prodigy also gets cut pretty quick as you bring up the resonance - in fact many synths do this.

So it's difficult to make judgements based on the behaviour of a synth you've never used - I have some broad understanding of the Pro One's character, but don't know it intimately. It may be the filter models that you find *don't* take away the bottom end quickly are the *less* accurate ones to the original...

[do_androids_dream]

All the others take away that bottom end too quick when the filter's closing.

I never had a Pro One (it was the monosynth I wanted back in the day, but was too expensive).

Instead, I got a Moog Prodigy (which hopefully Urs will be tackling next because the hardsync sound is the nastiest dirtiest sync around and would I'm sure be a super-fun modelling experiment ) and the bottom end of the Prodigy also gets cut pretty quick as you bring up the resonance - in fact many synths do this.

So it's difficult to make judgements based on the behaviour of a synth you've never used - I have some broad understanding of the Pro One's character, but don't know it intimately. It may be the filter models that you find *don't* take away the bottom end quickly are the *less* accurate ones to the original...

Something also key to my opinion is that I very rarely use more than a touch of resonance. I'm not a fan of high resonance sounds full stop (I kind of despise filter sweeps - I find them cheesy and gimmicky at best..) so I don't really test stuff at high resonance settings very much. The only use I have for high resonance is for making kick drums on some synths. As such, 1 & 2 make me 'feel' like I'm tweaking a real analog filter at settings I like to use.

[beely]

Something also key to my opinion is that I very rarely use more than a touch of resonance. I'm not a fan of high resonance sounds full stop (I kind of despise filter sweeps - I find them cheesy and gimmicky at best..) so I don't really test stuff at high resonance settings very much. The only use I have for high resonance is for making kick drums on some synths. As such, 1 & 2 make me 'feel' like I'm tweaking a real analog filter at settings I like to use.

Yeah, I feel similarly in many ways.

But aside from that though, have you *tried* investigating the behaviour at high resonances? And at high audio modulation rates? Do you still *feel* like you are using an analog filter using Filter 1 under those circumstances?

[Vesius]

It's about *quality*. The filter with the best behaviour, handling, least artifacts, and what we can determine in blind listening, which then Urs can use to determine a baseline for an acceptable model quality that will satisfy most people, including the ones with discerning filter ears (which I don't count myself one of, really).

Hang on. You're right, I don't happen to have a pro1 to hand. But irrespective of, Quality is a very subjective thing ... I'd expect an analog filter to exhibit artefacts, and vary in pitch according to hard it was being driven, all sorts of things. What I wouldn't expect is a completely stable and smooth filter - that's what I'd expect from a digital filter that had been heavily antialiased. I'd expect an analogue synth to be brighter and harder in the uppers - this got ripped out of digital synths to get rid of aliases and we were told it was good. But ... this isn't a quality (the lack of brightness) I really rate.

[electro]

RePro-Alpha is the most exciting Synth development so far for 2016. I was waiting on Native Instruments to follow up Monark with a 5 voice Prophet 5. Maybe U-he will be the one to do it.

[fmr]

But aside from that though, have you *tried* investigating the behaviour at high resonances? And at high audio modulation rates? Do you still *feel* like you are using an analog filter using Filter 1 under those circumstances?

Or 4, for that matter...

[deltaMACHINE]

Filter 4 is the answer

Please stop this we don't want an Access Virus OK !

[Vesius]

But aside from that though, have you *tried* investigating the behaviour at high resonances? And at high audio modulation rates? Do you still *feel* like you are using an analog filter using Filter 1 under those circumstances?

Or 4, for that matter...

This is true. Although my vote is done I'm starting to lean towards 3. FFS. Can't one just be better

although I can get 3 to alias too now. Still stubbornly trying to get anything past 2 or 5 ...

[Synthetic Wav]

None of them sound incredibly analog to me, which is why i chose the one i prefer

same, never had a wow moment with a big smile, it make me think it s maybe just the curtis filter that is not very exciting for me , taste..

i think this synth will be great but to understand my statement above, i m big fan of some roland filters mostly..

i may be wrong as i didn t check much but it seems the osc level don t change the filter behavior? is it like this on a pro one?

[Vesius]

i may be wrong as i didn t check much but it seems the osc level don t change the filter behavior? is it like this on a pro one?

You are wrong, you'll be glad to hear.

[bsterz]

FMR,
we talking about the PRO ONE.
This is not a perfect synth, its from the 80s

This is key. I don't think many are taking this into account. The pro one is a dirty synth with a very thumpy bottom end when running the filter envelope decay very fast. This only comes across with filters 1 & 2 for me. All the others take away that bottom end too quick when the filter's closing.

Sorry to spam the video.


This is mostly filter 5 and all from the RePro.

I haven't had trouble getting my Pro One thump from most any of the models. I've also not been able to get quite as much overdriven tone from any of them, but I'm wondering if that's not to do with mixer input circuits.

I do think that 2-5 all trim low end more quickly than I'd like. I am going to pull out my Pro One tonight, but I thought I recall the low end starting to cut back more around 4.5-5.5 - and I feel like this happens around 2.5-3.5 for me with the RePro, but when I finally was able to put my video through speakers or in-ear headphones, I realized how thumpy things were.

[Synthetic Wav]

the filter behavior doesen t change much depending the level to me i was expecting less resonance and hoping for more drive the more it s pushed , more dynamic change some sort of "compression" caused by the drived filter input or the amp maybe ,it stay quite rigid, but i have no experience with a pro one..

i m listening right now on a single osc test and 3 and 5 definetely self oscillate better , gel better with the osc sound than 4 to me.. as i posted earlier, these are not tuned exactly the same but it s seems way harder to find a sweet spot on 4 at least for that sound/test ,dunno if it s in general .

from retesting a little i end with same conclusion as yesterday, on the tests i did ( more or less in self oscillation range ) 3 and 5 are the best, these can sound more natural and then more analog to me. ( i didnt try much 1 as it s sound very different, and between the others , 2 and 4 don't sounded right on most osccasion next to 3 and 5 for me.)

[scoplunk]

I had a jet lag day in Australia yesterday so thought I’d give a listen to the Repro filters. I don’t know if it’s because I was jet lagged or because it was interesting, but I spent way more time than I should have on it!

I’m old enough that I owned and played plenty of the original commercial mono synths, but really spent a lot of time with the poly synths in the 80s. I used Sequential Circuits gear at the time, but never a Pro 1. I’ve long since sold most of them and I don’t have a real analog synth in front of me here, so other than hearing artifacts that are obviously digital, I’m not sure how to determine which filter is the most analog sounding, but of course, I can pick the ones that I like just as well as anyone else.

In general, when the filters weren’t being pushed hard, most of them sounded similar and pretty good to me. There were a few things that I’m sure were unavoidable in the testing that made comparing a little difficult. Filters that seemed brighter usually seemed a little louder, which sometimes made them more attractive. Also, the tuning of the filters was slightly different. When the filters were self oscillating at a fixed pitch, 1 and 4 were almost a 1/2 step below the other three, although there were small pitch discrepancies between all the filters.

All of this stuff seemed pretty normal, but the one thing that did seem odd was that I couldn’t get the cutoff to do a decent keyboard tracking. I never did figure it out. It seemed that if the cutoff was around 3 and the keyboard track was around 7, I could get something close for about an octave or two, but then it fell apart. Similarly, if I moved the cutoff up or down, the same octave that tracked well before no longer tracked correctly at all. I understand that analog synths didn’t always track perfectly, but this seems pretty extreme the other direction. Plus, Diva, which is a plug in devoted to analog behavior, doesn’t do anything like this. If I get the keyboard tracking correct in Diva, I can move the cutoff anywhere I want and the correct pitch relationship is maintained. So, I don’t know if this feature simply wasn’t finished in Repro 1 or what’s going on, but since I like to do things with tuned resonance, it was a little bit of a bummer.

There have already been a lot of great comments in this forum and I learned a lot from checking out what others observed. In the end I started to feel like there were mainly two different approaches that I was hearing and it broke down like this for me:

Filters 1 & 4
Filter 1 - This thing is the loudest, nastiest, noisiest and most unpredictable of the 5 filters. In short, it’s wonderful! But unless analog filters of old included lots of what sounds like digital noise to me, it wouldn’t be a great choice for an analog filter emulation. Still, I’d love to have this filter. When it’s frequency modulated and sweeping, it’s a big, noisy treat.

Filter 4 - This seems like the slightly tamed little brother of filter 1. I’m starting to think that the fact that they’re tuned the same as each other, but a little differently from the others, isn’t a coincidence. Anyway, this filter retains a lot of what I like about filter 1 without so many artifacts. It still sounds a little noisy at times, but I can’t say for certain that it’s digital noise without hearing it against the original Pro 1. This filter retains a lot of the real craziness of filter 1 when it’s frequency modulated and sweeping, which sounds like the kind of thing I heard in the example audio file from the Pro 1 that Urs posted.

Filters 5 & 2
Filter 5 - This approach seems like the polar opposite of filter 1. It’s very smooth and polite. It’s almost elegant sounding. One thing I didn’t like was that it’s obviously attenuating the high end more than the other filters. Still, there were things I liked about this filter until someone here pointed out that it didn’t do well when frequency modulated. At first I didn’t think much of that, but the more I started to push these filters, the more obvious it became that something different is going on with this filter when I try to frequency modulate it and make it sweep. It appears that the same envelope amount settings and oscB-VCF Cutoff settings send this filter’s cutoff up much higher than 1, 3 or 4. As a result, it can sound like it isn’t working correctly at all unless you’re patient and wait for the cutoff to fall into the same frequency range as the others start in. I started to move the cutoff down when testing this filter and that made it sound much more like the others, but it always sounds weak to me when it’s being pushed.

Filter 2 - Like filter 4 is filter 1’s little brother, I feel like filter 2 is filter 5’s. I have to admit to never being a big fan of this filter, but I couldn’t really articulate why. It acts exactly like filter 5 when it’s modulated and sweeping. I have to bring down the cutoff to get a similar result to 1,3 and 4. There’s nothing wrong with it, it just isn’t my favorite.

Filter 3 - This one seems like the bridge between the other filter approaches. It’s neither as aggressive and noisy as the 1,4 filters nor as tame as the 2,5 filters. If I were goldilocks, this would be my filter. I’m not goldilocks, but this may be my choice anyway.

It’s between 3 and 4 for me. At the moment, I’m leaning towards 3, but ask me again in an hour and it may be 4...

[Howard]

...one thing that did seem odd was that I couldn’t get the cutoff to do a decent keyboard tracking.

Although it concerns the filter, I wouldn't worry about tracking until we're at the late beta stage