Repro-1 (out now)

[zerocrossing]

Then I bought a Prophet 6 because I kept hearing demos that haunted my dreams (in a good way) I sold Diva a few weeks later. The difference was night and day.

You just bought a (beautiful) new P6, sat in front of the lovely physicality of the thing, tweaked it's custom physical control surface, and had fun making noise - and you came to the conclusion it's wonderful and much better than a softsynth?

No surprise there...

I'm responding to the claim that (I paraphrase) Diva is a 100% perfect emulation of analog synthesis.

Most of the time when I play I'm facing the computer monitor I'm looking at right now. The desk it's on also has my main 61 key controller and Mackie HR824s. I can't see the Prophet 6 at all and Diva is on a different computer so I have to turn my head to see both of them. I still feel that it sounds better than any software synth for that kind of simple pure sound. When I'm looking for modulation mayhem, or even just non-analog style waveforms, I'll always go to software and I personally think that synths like Zebra trounce a Virus. (Sold my C the day I bought Zebra)

[chk071]

Then I bought a Prophet 6 because I kept hearing demos that haunted my dreams (in a good way) I sold Diva a few weeks later. The difference was night and day.

You just bought a (beautiful) new P6, sat in front of the lovely physicality of the thing, tweaked it's custom physical control surface, and had fun making noise - and you came to the conclusion it's wonderful and much better than a softsynth?

No surprise there...

Interesting that you totally leave aside the primary statement in the text you quoted. Which said that he "... kept hearing demos that haunted my dreams (in a good way) [...] The difference was night and day.". If he meant the haptic of the hardware, why did he speak of sound demos, and that the difference (in sound, what else?)was night and day. Or do you hear tones when you touch, feel and see something?

[beely]

No, but the knowledge, and the tactile feel and touch, all affect your cognitive response to what you are hearing.
That's confirmation bias, and to remove it, you have to double-blind.

Of course the P6 is also a wonderful piece of gear too...

[chk071]

No, but the knowledge, and the tactile feel and touch, all affect your cognitive response to what you are hearing.
That's confirmation bias, and to remove it, you have to double-blind.

Assuming it to be present is in any way an... assumption though. I would also say the severeness of this phenomene is pretty much a matter of your character. If your emo much, you surely will say hardware is better, even with your ears plugged. Maybe i'd also claim that the hardware sounds better, when it in fact sounds absolutely the same, because i also dig tactile feeling. The question is if i'd claim that it's "day and night". At least for me, they will have to be very different. Interestingly, i found Monark and Diva very different, although they both mimic the Minimoog. I don't know if i'd say they were day and night, but it was at least close to that.

[beely]

Sure. It's all subjective. What you interpret his "day and night" to mean might be very different to what he intended it to mean. And a quick forum post, rather than a long detailed question and answer, is often going to result in some assumptions - the back and forth nature is what smoothes these things out.

Note - I didn't mean to disregard his experience, just to say that it's more complex than a one liner really. it might be entirely possible to set Diva up to sound very much like the P6, but just that it doesn't straight away do the same thing. Who knows - I don't have either, so I can't really comment on that.

But the P6 and the OB6 are the only recent synths (hardware) that straight away made me think "whoa!" just from audio demos, and I'm fairly jaded these days - that fact that any synth could do that was surprising to me. So I entirely expect them to sound great to play with - plus you get all that cool, tactile, customer control surface, and smell stuff to increase the experience still further...

[chk071]

You're right, it probably always plays into it. A human being can surely always build up a better relationship to something physical than something virtual, i don't have a doubt about that. It's tricky, yet i wouldn't fully deny when someone claims that something hardware sounds better (to him/her). It's not even something hardware specific so much for me, born from the need to make it a quality product because of the asking price, it is in many cases also the pure experience the people who create those synths have. And from experience and success, they simply know how to strike a chord i guess.

[louderr]

All right, I attempted to rethink things and re-tried everything on my Mac Book Pro i7, in Ableton and watching CPU usage (which i know is large because of all filters running, etc). I used some of the patches found here and a good one I made, called "Slime Wow". I got the same artifacts as before on #3 and #4, so was unable to get a very good idea with anything swept or heavily modulated or in high freq/res ranges. But I got the same impressions as before. #5 sounded bland, although it had the least artifacts and stayed clean throughout the ranges. #1 was fat and badass and had good "tingle' and "excitement", with nice grit. #2 failed to reproduce the "fun" lo-res 8-bit effect that had attracted me to it as an optional 2nd choice. So now I'm still convinced that #1 sounds best overall. I have demos of every U-He synth, Ace and Diva run very well on my computer and sound wonderful. Repro is promising indeed but I have yet to hear what everyone likes about #3 and #4. Just for the record, something about filters #3 and 4 also "polluted" other plug ins in Ableton when I invoked them with Repro and passed the identical aliasing and other crud into them as well. I'm sure that will corrected, but in case no one has caught that yet it was interesting to note.

If you were unable to get a good idea with anything swept or heavily modulated or in high freq/res ranges with #3 and #4, I wonder how did you get through with #1 (which, in my experience, was even worse).

yeah 1 was a bit glitchy too but not as problematic (for me) as 3 and 4. I had the least problems with 5 and frankly it seemed the best functioning overall but "something" made me dislike it emotionally. It was sort of bland? Hard to explain. I'm about to try it on a more powerful 2.8g Quad workstation with a subwoofer. so hopefully I'll get the full show this time More on that later!

[zerocrossing]

Sure. It's all subjective. What you interpret his "day and night" to mean might be very different to what he intended it to mean. And a quick forum post, rather than a long detailed question and answer, is often going to result in some assumptions - the back and forth nature is what smoothes these things out.

Note - I didn't mean to disregard his experience, just to say that it's more complex than a one liner really. it might be entirely possible to set Diva up to sound very much like the P6, but just that it doesn't straight away do the same thing. Who knows - I don't have either, so I can't really comment on that.

But the P6 and the OB6 are the only recent synths (hardware) that straight away made me think "whoa!" just from audio demos, and I'm fairly jaded these days - that fact that any synth could do that was surprising to me. So I entirely expect them to sound great to play with - plus you get all that cool, tactile, customer control surface, and smell stuff to increase the experience still further...

Do this for fun. Go to Soundcloud and pick a bunch of Diva demos and load them into a play list without listening to them. Now do the same with Prophet 6 demos (in the same play list) put them on random and make a note of which ones (by number, don't look at what's playing) really grab you. Then, hit the back button and go back and see what ones were played.

[Urs]

Do this for fun. Go to Soundcloud and pick a bunch of Diva demos and load them into a play list without listening to them. Now do the same with Prophet 6 demos (in the same play list) put them on random and make a note of which ones (by number, don't look at what's playing) really grab you. Then, hit the back button and go back and see what ones were played.

You'd be surprised

[fmr]

Do this for fun. Go to Soundcloud and pick a bunch of Diva demos and load them into a play list without listening to them. Now do the same with Prophet 6 demos (in the same play list) put them on random and make a note of which ones (by number, don't look at what's playing) really grab you. Then, hit the back button and go back and see what ones were played.

You'd be surprised

I concur, and the blind test with the OB-8 showed that, IMO. One thing is the physical interaction, and how that "messes" with our brain and our senses (I agree on that point)-. Another is a blind listening test to "just" sounds, preferably more or less the same sounds.

IMO (educated guess), that last scenario will give more or less 50:50 results, as people will end guessing at random, based exclusively in their own taste. Anyway, I'm tired of this hardware/software debate (and I am an old owner of some classics). Can we please get back to the real topic?

[pdxindy]

Do this for fun. Go to Soundcloud and pick a bunch of Diva demos and load them into a play list without listening to them. Now do the same with Prophet 6 demos (in the same play list) put them on random and make a note of which ones (by number, don't look at what's playing) really grab you. Then, hit the back button and go back and see what ones were played.

I have not played the Prophet 6, just listened to sound demos, but it just does not do it for me. Very good synth but for example, the sound demos from the Minilogue just catch my ears more. And while I can hear the analogue-ness of the P6 and appreciate it, I like Diva better. Diva sounds prettier and sweeter to me.

[Urs]

Do this for fun. Go to Soundcloud and pick a bunch of Diva demos and load them into a play list without listening to them. Now do the same with Prophet 6 demos (in the same play list) put them on random and make a note of which ones (by number, don't look at what's playing) really grab you. Then, hit the back button and go back and see what ones were played.

I have not played the Prophet 6, just listened to sound demos, but it just does not do it for me. Very good synth but for example, the sound demos from the Minilogue just catch my ears more. And while I can hear the analogue-ness of the P6 and appreciate it, I like Diva better. Diva sounds prettier and sweeter to me.

To me the Prophet 6 is one of the best sounding/feeling hardware poly synth I've ever laid hands on. The knobs are perfect for me, the digital envelopes don't suck at all, the sound is incredibly warm and round. It feels like a crafted, solid instrument, totally opposed to the plastic that cuts the corners for pricing of other synths. Which is also true for the fully discrete build of the electronics inside.

I would love to take it as a reference for a new set of Diva algorithms, but... many features are implemented completely differently from a Prophet 5, one can't even begin to compare the two. One can't add the OSC waveforms in the same way, highpass filters are laid out differently, the LFOs are bipolar, modulation depths are different and all that. We'd have to make it a modern synth impersonation. But until then, we have plenty of dinosaur's to save from extinction...

[EvilDragon]

And OB6 is even better.

[urosh]

... I selected #4 back on page 4, purely because a couple of patches I made sounded more alive to me. I felt #1 was in the same ball park, but just too exaggerated.

Yeah, that's the word, alive. One thing that bothers me with most (if not every) VA I used is that on bass patches with low cutoff, high end sounds completely dead to me, unnatural void in higher registers. No analog synth I've used behave like this. Not even supposedly clean and HiFi Ebbe&Flut (which is IMHO best sounding filter ever made by humans but that's whole different story). There is always some sizzle up there no matter how faint, together with midrange presence. Thing is, I guess this is either non-existent issue or superminor nuance for most people, but for me it is major thing. So, after initial adjustment I was very surprised by RePro. Model 1 in particular is over the top even against analogs. Didn't like the sound on it's own, but in the mix it behaves incredible, unlike Diva, which is (was) still pretty much default ITB option for me but is always major PITA for mixing, particularly if I use it for bass. (BTW, something always bothered me with Diva envelopes but I thought that I imagined things, but RePro does resonant blips very good, so I'm back to theory that something is weird with Diva envs.)

[shroom81]

BTW, something always bothered me with Diva envelopes but I thought that I imagined things, but RePro does resonant blips very good, so I'm back to theory that something is weird with Diva envs

I'm afraid I have to second that, I used to have a Juno-6 and the envelopes on it were a lot faster then Diva's. I would love to be able to make snappy stabs with Diva. Faster envelopes pretty please ?