Minimoog Softsynth Shootout: Diva MiniV3 Monark Legend Minimonsta vs Model D

[egbert101]

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[Examigan]

(makes me want to do a proper Minimoog clone again, but d'oh... when?)

You tease.

When? Now.

[Chris-S]

Soo, what is this "squelchy tone" the guy in the vid is talking about?

[Ingonator]

As stated in the video if you watched it. [You really should watch it BTW, as this is the kind of detailed stuff you're into.]

Actually as already mentioned i own most plugins in the video (and owned Minimonsta ages ago) and i think The Legend is the closest you could get.

I also prefer doing patches for The Legend (and posting them in my thread at the soundware forum and/or in the factory content...) instead of doing endless and/or pointless comparisons.

Doing any further comparisons myself is no fun anymore and i will no longer do them anytime soon. I did them mostly due to posts of others here at KVR not as i was really intersted in it myself. I had already done enough comparisons during the Beta to know that The Legend is as close as possible.
Audio demos and a video comparisojn posted by Synapse Audio did also show that they are damn close.
I also found this when i replicated patch sheets (the "Classic" opatches in the factory content) and using audio demos of the same patches created from the real thing (those audio demos and/or samples were also used for fine tuning).

With the tweaking options at the back panel in The Legend you could make it sound even close to different Minimoog units or go beyond what the original synths was capable of (same is true about using the other advanced features).

[Urs]

Soo, what is this "squelchy tone" the guy in the vid is talking about?

I think what it is, is either the 50/60Hz humm bleeding into the signal path (e.g. modulating pitch a bit), or maybe two oscillators bleeding through (adding some beating).

In either case, the hardware sounds more "alive" while the software sounds more stale - in this video.

This exposes a common problem developers like us have. How should we weigh effects in analogue synths that users might perceive as bugs? Just recently there was a thread where someone asked if the bleeding of dry oscillator signal was a bug in Monark - because they did model this. To prevent this, a developer would typically say "this is a non-desirable artifact", to avoid looking buggy, maybe add an option or mention it in the user manual. There are hundreds of decisions like that to be made on the way from concept to finished emulation.

For Diva we decided to make things "sound nice", for Repro-1 we decided on "let there be bugs", but then we chose the "ideal" VCO preset as default anyway. Had we done Diva today, we would have probably added a few more gritty options.

[egbert101]

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[Faza]

Soo, what is this "squelchy tone" the guy in the vid is talking about?

I think what it is, is either the 50/60Hz humm bleeding into the signal path (e.g. modulating pitch a bit), or maybe two oscillators bleeding through (adding some beating).

In either case, the hardware sounds more "alive" while the software sounds more stale - in this video.

This exposes a common problem developers like us have. How should we weigh effects in analogue synths that users might perceive as bugs? Just recently there was a thread where someone asked if the bleeding of dry oscillator signal was a bug in Monark - because they did model this. To prevent this, a developer would typically say "this is a non-desirable artifact", to avoid looking buggy, maybe add an option or mention it in the user manual. There are hundreds of decisions like that to be made on the way from concept to finished emulation.

For Diva we decided to make things "sound nice", for Repro-1 we decided on "let there be bugs", but then we chose the "ideal" VCO preset as default anyway. Had we done Diva today, we would have probably added a few more gritty options.

In my opinion, such options are the perfect and best possible decisions. I think that every synth emulation should offer a "ideal" preset, that will be free defectless of defects considered as bugs and modelled first by circuit model, then allow to choose such defects individually per preset. It's like when they produce the hardware synths, they do everything by blue print and then these artifacts appear, because of the nature of the hardware synths and nature at all.

[Urs]

This "squelchiness" or "liveness" had me up thinking all night what it could be. It has to be lack of movement somewhere in the waveform as it cycles. Perhaps because digital waveforms are "too perfect".

Hmmm, I think it's obviously some form of beating/modulation. The three possible sources are other oscillators, the humm from the transformer or just astray, maybe filtered noise. It might be as simple as the ModWheel not closing fully on this particular Minimoog, while it does on others.

It's hard to say, really, and with another Minimoog for reference all examples would sound wrong again, including the hardware used in the video.

[Urs]

For Diva we decided to make things "sound nice", for Repro-1 we decided on "let there be bugs", but then we chose the "ideal" VCO preset as default anyway. Had we done Diva today, we would have probably added a few more gritty options.

In my opinion, such options are the perfect and best possible decisions. I think that every synth emulation should offer a "ideal" preset, that will be free defectless of defects considered as bugs and modelled first by circuit model, then allow to choose such defects individually per preset. It's like when they produce the hardware synths, they do everything by blue print and then these artifacts appear, because of the nature of the hardware synths and nature at all.

Yes, but then, implementing all these options costs a lot of time but returns little value. Add to that, it may make the software look more complex and complicated than it is, when the target audience looks for a simple and classic architecture. And what for, really? Just to win a shoot out?

Thing is, even with Repro-1 we've seen reputable outlets do A/B tests where they got everything wrong. It's really annoying when these people destroy your product and don't even take the time to read the manual. Or maybe deliberately omit the options. It's a tedious job for us to rectify the results, say, when we create better examples and post them. Thankfully that phase seems to be over, but the next one is coming for sure. (I'm explicitely not talking about Mr. Carr, he did a pretty good job with the Pro-One shoot out, but we still had to clear some things up)

In essence, if it makes a synth a better instrument, I'd rather sacrifice the chance to win a shoot out than water down the concept. After all, each software emulation is also an interpretation. People expect enhanced features, and they also expect flaws of hardware to be fixed (tuning...).

[Cinebient]

I think we have enough Minimoogs in the world now, in every form imaginable...

But from Moog itself not (at least no software).
But we know they would make it an app only.

[egbert101]

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[egbert101]

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[suthnear]

(makes me want to do a proper Minimoog clone again, but d'oh... when?)

You tease.

When? Now.

The minimoog market is pretty crowded and we're heading into the realm of fractal differences. The octave cat and the repro 5 will otoh take care of itches that are currently unscratched.

And as for the squelch, the most obvious artefact to me is the crackle/glitch in the the attack in a few of the soft synths. It sounds like his mini is a little slower on the attack and a little longer in the release. Also, listening to it (and looking at his plots) it seems like there is a bit more resonance in the filter (bumping the resonance also softened the attack as well). I got much closer to his mini saw examples (well into the realm of not caring about the differences) with both diva and monark with a little tweaking. Monark required slightly more (including closing the filter a bit) as it seems to have wider parameter ranges.

It'd be nice to have the renders of this project as youtube is probably messing things up a bit, though.

[chk071]

Starskey Carr set up a thread on this video on a certain other internet forum (rhythms with beerguts ) but I don't want to directly link if it breaks any rules here.

I think it's ok. At least i linked to Reasontalk a few times, and noone took offense.

Regarding the Minimoog emus: I think the main point is that those sell, not so much that developers think there has been the one or two things missing with the emus already on the market.

[egbert101]

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