Diva...the Test of Time...

[zerocrossing]

"...the hand-waving ease it takes to put out some trumpety misinformation. "

A stealworthy phrase

Maybe U-he should put a "non-disparaging public language " phrase in the eula.

[jbuonacc]

... It's surely not scientifically meaningful, but it shows that Diva has a somewhat muted character. ...

horrible example, i don't think this shows off Diva's filter FM capabilities very well at all and is not a fair representation of what it can do. it's capable of far better than this, i know that much.

do you remember what filter model you used for this?

[jbuonacc]

... The way i see it, we have 3 Minimoog emulations on a very high quality level now, and they all sound different from each other. ...

or maybe they really don't...

... As for sound, I just fired up Diva next to that other Minimoog emulation. I don't get why people would rate Diva's audio rate modulation, bottom end or just about anything inferior. Confirmation bias? If anything, the other emulation is more tame and sterile sounding. Kind of well behaved.

i need to properly reply to many points in this thread, but i got home earlier and started reading the posts that were added while i was out. this caught my attention, i immediately thought "why would he be comparing Diva's moog emulation to Legend? (i knew you didn't mean Monark, as i already know how different they are.) when i first installed the Legend demo i of course had to see how it compared to Monark. i quickly found that those two are quite different from each other. as much as i love Monark for what it is, based on the recent Legend hype and audio comparisons i resigned myself to believing that it was a more faithful emulation overall. Monark is one of my favorite synths and i think it really captures the moog sound, but still... sorry to say, but i had written off Diva as an un-realistic moog emulation years ago and didn't think it stood a chance against either of them. (i'll get back to this later.)

your comment there had me curious to put both Diva and Legend side by side and see just what you were talking about. over the next hour or two of my own "OCD" testing, i found that the results were pretty shocking. quite similar to my findings yesterday when comparing the Roland 'SH-101' plug-in against TAL 'Bassline-101':

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=474118&p=6630047&hilit=tal#p6630047

i couldn't believe how closely i could get Diva to sound almost exactly like Legend, and in some ways even better. i thought that Diva had a beautiful "thwap" to it when applying FM to the filter that i just couldn't match with Legend. it doesn't seem to have as much range, but Legend almost always sounded more brash/gritty and not nearly as pleasing as i found it to be on Diva. the scaling ("calibration") of certain parameters is a bit different on each of them, and i had a hell of a time trying to match the response of the envelopes (somehow i didn't think to swap out the moog-style env's of Diva for the traditional ADSR envelopes while i was doing it - duh), but in most all cases i was able to match the sound of both surprisingly well. couldn't believe how close they sound to each other. for both to be modeled after different minimoogs and still sound so similar really says a lot about the quality of the emulations.

really learned a lesson with this, and i'm happy to admit that i was wrong to dismiss Diva as a serious moog emulation for all this time. like i said before, the more i use Diva the more i'm impressed with it. this certainly doesn't resolve a number of "gripes" that i have with Diva (or its fanboys), but my appreciation for it continues to grow.

Don't get why anyone with so many "it's-good-but"s would recommend Diva to anyone.

i'd do this with even my favorite synths. every synth has it's strengths and drawbacks, and not every synth is right for everyone. this is one of the problems that i see with Diva, that a lot of people just blindly recommend it as pretty much the only synth that anyone will ever need. i don't feel this is the case at all, and think even the biggest Diva fans should have a more open mind when it comes to "analog emulation" plug-ins. there are a lot of synths out there, but with all the Diva hype over the past five years you almost wouldn't know it.

[Teksonik]

As for sound, I just fired up Diva next to that other Minimoog emulation. I don't get why people would rate Diva's audio rate modulation, bottom end or just about anything inferior. Confirmation bias? If anything, the other emulation is more tame and sterile sounding. Kind of well behaved.

By "that other Minimoog emulation" do you mean The Legend or Monark ?

[chk071]

... The way i see it, we have 3 Minimoog emulations on a very high quality level now, and they all sound different from each other. ...

or maybe they really don't...

Says who?

[jbuonacc]

... By "that other Minimoog emulation" do you mean The Legend or Monark ?

definitely The Legend, see my post above. they sound unbelievably similar to each other. i wouldn't necessarily say that Legend sounds more "tame and sterile" though*, and overall i think it's more fun to use just because of how it's configured. i get a slightly better feeling when sweeping the filter cutoff (for example) and a number of other things when using Legend. a pretty boring synth overall, but that's just because it's streamlined to be quite faithful to the original and doesn't overload you with options.

* EDIT: i do see what he's saying though. the different envelope curves (among other things?) make Legend seem a bit "static/stiff" at some settings. i think i noticed that the Legend tuning seemed to "drift" a bit more while i was doing it though (??).

Says who?

says me, i just f'ing wrote it all out for everyone to see. have you compared them side by side and matched them? Diva and Legend are very similar, while Monark sounds quite a bit different.

[Funkybot's Evil Twin]

@zerocrossing - you could've given a much better UI example than Arturia's. That example was really, really bad. A whopping (eyeballed estimate) one quarter of the area the UI takes is just empty, useless space. So bad. And contrast is appalling, some fonts way too thin. They can make their GUIs at 8K, it wouldn't matter, it would still suck because they simply don't know how to do it well (IMO).

Also - don't forget that you're not the only one who studied UI/UX. Urs started out as an industrial designer, so he does know his shit. Much like you apparently do. But of course, everyone has their own vision of things...

You totally miss the point of that example and take it out of the context of my post. Showing Mini V was in the context of an example of how two UI art styles can exist side by side if it makes sense in a broader context. I wasn't even considering the UX aspect of it. Just the two art styles. Arturia has said, "Here's the simulation (skeuomorphic) and here's where we grafted our functionality onto it. (Non skeumorphic) I feel that works. That's all.

In my very non-expert opinion, but as a user of both Diva and the Arturia products, I disagree. The flat, modern, top-panel just doesn't work for me next to their over skeumorphic designs. It's visually confusing. Is that a hidden computer that's supposed to pop down from the top of the instrument? And while you weren't trying to make a comment about the UX aspect of that particular example, you were knocking Diva for font readability and again highlighted MiniV. As an end user, I'm perfectly fine with skuemorphic designs where they make sense, and I can equally love a flat, modern UI. And it's very difficult to judge a UI on aesthetics when the UX is so bad. Most of the Arturia UI's fall flat on both regards IMO. Small text? Yep. Wasted space? Yep. Inconsistent design elements? Yep. Lots of extra clicks and hidden parameters? Yep. Small, hard to read controls? Yep. Having to vertically scroll a UI? Yep. Wasteful resource use (HD space requirements due to different sizes and individual keys)? Yep.

I'm a BIG Diva fan. It'd be my desert island softsynth. I don't disagree with all of your critiques on the UI design, you had some valid points, but overall, it's a very good lookng UI. This might sound much snottier than I intend it to, but if you can do better, then I'd strongly encourage you to do so. If you can figure out how to improve the Diva UI, make a skin, sell it if you'd like. I'd certainly be in for $15 or so if you can actually accomplish that and U-he makes doing so very easy.

It sounds like you never were a fan of Diva, and that's fine. There's a lot of products I just don't connect with for various reasons. For instance, I love simpler, classic-style synths like Repro, Diva, Legend, and Monark, and I just don't jive with more complex synths like Zebra, Hive, or Serum, etc. That's perfectly fine, those products just aren't for me. No need to jump in the Zebra3 thread and talk about how the modulation system can be rewritten, or waste time posting about Dune's UI. When I find something I'd like to see improved in a product I really like and know I'll spend a lot of time with, I'll suggest it, but otherwise, I'll just move on. There's a weird trend on forums where it seems like people feel they have to like every product and share every opinion ad nauseum, even after admitting they just don't get on with a particular product or concept. For instance, how many more times will people ask about a poly version of Repro? The tirades about how "there's absolutely no reason it couldn't be poly" are just insanity at this point. If you don't like it, don't buy it and don't waste energy on something you're not going to improve.

Anyway, I'll get off my high horse now. I'm sure I haven't always been the shepherd of the same good advice I'm espousing here, but I'm trying real hard Ringo...

[chk071]

Says who?

says me, i just f'ing wrote it all out for everyone to see. have you compared them side by side and matched them? Diva and Legend are very similar, while Monark sounds quite a bit different.

Actually, yes. With Legend and Monark, and briefly, with Diva. All 3 sound different. Of course not vastly different, after all, they all model the same synth, but they definitely do sound different.

[jbuonacc]

Actually, yes. With Legend and Monark, and briefly, with Diva. All 3 sound different.

try it again with Diva if you can, they're very similar. so similar that i thinks it's a stretch to say they're "all different". you can pretty easily match the sound almost 1:1 (within reason, and obviously not with exactly the same settings - plenty of close listening and small adjustments) on both, which i found almost impossible when comparing Legend to Monark.

do i really need to post audio examples?

[Teksonik]

... By "that other Minimoog emulation" do you mean The Legend or Monark ?

definitely The Legend, see my post above. they sound unbelievably similar to each other. i wouldn't necessarily say that Legend sounds more "tame and sterile" though*.

Well if Urs is indeed talking about The Legend I must respectfully disagree with him. I love DIVA but I found Legend just blows away DIVA's Minimoog Module. I think in comparison DIVA is more "tame and sterile" and in fact I was surprised by that result. I'm talking about sounds which I find useful not some extreme modulation patches. I'm not saying one sounds more like the original than the other and don't care if they do. I haven't spent a lot of time A/B'ing DIVA and the Legend but the time I did spend convinced me that I won't be using DIVA's Minimoog any longer. Of course DIVA just blows away the Legend in Polyphonic sounds and has a much wider range of sounds so I think owning both makes perfect sense.

[zerocrossing]

... It's surely not scientifically meaningful, but it shows that Diva has a somewhat muted character. ...

horrible example, i don't think this shows off Diva's filter FM capabilities very well at all and is not a fair representation of what it can do. it's capable of far better than this, i know that much.

do you remember what filter model you used for this?

Moog. Started at 50%, no resonance. Started with an init patch but I've got osc 1 an octave down. From there I'm just playing around with cutoff and resonance. It's super simple, so I don't know how it could be a horrible example, especially as I started at the same place in all the examples. Maybe my copy needed service?

[jbuonacc]

Well if Urs is indeed talking about The Legend I must respectfully disagree with him. I love DIVA but I found Legend just blows away DIVA's Minimoog Module.

sure, besides the fact that it doesn't.

I haven't spent a lot of time A/B'ing DIVA and the Legend ...

well, then maybe you should. i just spent at least a good hour doing just that and found that he was right. believe me, i didn't want to agree with him, i've been dissing Diva as a legit moog/roland/whatever emulation publicly for years now. looks like i was wrong (at least as far as a minimoog emulation, based on how pleased everyone is with The Legend. still not thrilled with it as a juno emulation compared to U-NO-LX for example, though watch me prove myself wrong on that too). they might as well be derived from the same code, they're that similar. i can't say right now exactly how much they differ when you're tweaking a bunch of parameters live, but as far as programming similar patches and playing them they are very close. i didn't use any "extreme modulation" other than trying to match the filter FM settings, but i found that Diva actually sounded better in this regard. overall i thought that The Legend seemed a bit more "fine-tuned" and enjoyable to use, but in no way does it "blow away" Diva as a minimoog emulation.

i guess i'll have to start a comparison thread with audio examples.

[masterhiggins]

Nvrmnd. Forgot which forum I was on.

[Teksonik]

well, then maybe you should. i just spent at least a good hour doing just that and found that he was right. believe me

Why ? I spent enough time A/Bing Diva and The Legend to prove to myself that The Legend is superior for the type of sounds I use, believe me. I simply disagree with Urs that The Legend sounds "tame and sterile" in comparison to DIVA. I found the opposite to be true and was actually surprised by that fact.

Anyway I love Diva for what it does and I love The Legend for what it does. Like I said owning both make perfect sense if you remove the emotional attachments to either........

[Garzita]

I'll be quick:
*I cant believe someone referenced Arturia's GUI, they waste so much GUI real estate and their font is the worst.
* I do like the Galaxy Modulation though
* I just loaded up Diva and Arturia's Jupiter 8, head to head, cant believe I had never done it, and wow, Diva kills it.
* Diva's Jup8 Template plus Moog's filter.... yeah, insane
* Arturia's Jup8 going through Reaktor 6's Monark filters, nope, not there yet, not even close
* Diva's original GUI is not perfect either, but thank god for Volta and Plugmon's offerings, sometimes I cant decide which to use!
* and yeah, I understand Diva's CPU hunger, thus the "limited" modulation options... but I still would love something similar to Hive's in the lower half of the GUI and dedicate just one computer to it!!!
*why did I buy Arturia's line of products? I bought their KeyLab 61 (I love it) and a cheap upgrade to their collection was included, so I bought it and then again to upgrade to V3, i like their CS-80 and Wurlitzer (their CS-80 should come with a ZOOM, nope, not the resizable GUI, an actual ZOOM, the font OMG!)

Having worked on a daily basis for 2 years with some of the best collections of synths (like Tom Anselmi's in the Waldorf Hotel's music studio, where Egyptian Lover, Skrillex, Phil Western, Blood Diamonds, Grimes and many others jammed) with access to beautiful relics like a REAL Yamaha CS-80, every flavour of Moog you can imagine (mini voyager, little phatty, you name it), ARP2600s (yes, plural), Jupiters, Junos, Yamahas, etc, I can honestly say that I am a more than satisfied customer and user of Diva...

And better yet, no trips to Backline (synth repair shop) to get the synths fixed/tuned/calibrated at least every 3 months!!!!