What synths are in equal or better footing than VPS Avenger?

[noiseboyuk]

If you just want presets - Omnisphere is great. But that's all I use it for as I can't make any sense of how it actually puts sounds together. It's the one VSTi I regret actually buying because it cost a lot and ultimately...I rarely use it.

Yeah, I'm surprised by this too, I find Omni one of the most intuitive to program, but it is conceptually totally different to Avenger (which I also like). The great thing about Avenger is it's (nearly) all there in front of you, dragging, dropping and clicking. The concept of Omni is just to have it very broad and simple on the surface, and you drill down to the detail in anything.

[MegaPixel]

I think Rapid just has far better sound quality, everything that comes out of it just sounds better, not sure why. Kind of makes Avenger sound flat and a bit early 2000s mp3 lol, but I would like to see routing done way better as per phaseplant, vital, serum etc etc etc or blue print editor in unreal engine.

Omnisphere, I've never got on with it... Its a preset warehouse for me... I also find it slow and clunky, I was on support for nearly 3 weeks just trying to get it to stop lagging, never did solve that issue. It does have good / decent sound quality however but I wouldn't buy any expansions or extras for it, maybe an update when it goes to v3... But I don't even know about that... Got so much other stuff that covers everything it does and does a better job at it.

I own practically every synth plugin on the market and I use almost none of them because they sound like ass compared to my hardware synths (mostly analog and hybrid synths but also some classic VA's like the Virus TI and Nord Lead 2).

I just purchased Avenger because it was on sale for half off on Plugin Boutique. I already regret it. Everything on the UI is impossibly tiny and super cramped. I got sucked in by the wide variety of expansion packs which seem to sound reasonably good at least when listening to their demos. But at $70 a pop, these packs better be phenomenal (which I don't think is possible given that Avenger's synth engine sounds a little weak).

As an all around great sounding synth, Omnisphere just crushes everything out there. Sure it's expensive, but you get something like 14,000 incredible presets and a surprisingly powerful synth engine that is SO much easier to use than almost any other synth plugin out there (especially compared to Falcon which has the most convoluted information architecture of any "synth" I have ever owned).

People say that Omnisphere is slow to load patches and that its interface is sluggish. I don't know what they are talking about in terms of interface sluggishness. It seems plenty snappy to me.

Sure, Omnisphere takes a bit longer to load patches compared to a purely algorithmic synth like Diva. But Falcon takes WAY longer to load its sample-based "synth" patches. Even Avenger and Serum take longer to load most of their wavetable patches compared to Omnisphere.

Omnipwhere vs Avenger, not quite sure that is an apples vs apples comparison...
It's like comparing WAProduction SEKTOR vs Avenger.

As for Omnisphere being the king of Synthesizer?
For me, hell no, I find pretty average... It does have some great positives and some serious negatives.

Nice sounds at the cost of INSANE FILE SIZES, CPU load and loading times, stooopid file system and database files.

3rd party preset banks I find often use their own built in patches/presets and even the ones that don't soon start to all sound the same. Especially after going through every patch from spectrasonics and rating them. And tbh, I think most of them are crap, imo (each to their own)... Many many repeats of the same sound over and over and over, then near duplicates which have slight alterations and added to the library.

Omnisphere also runs like shait, on my machine and quite a lot of others, and my machine is no slouch. Spectrasonics support guys were nice, I've been on screen share with them but as a very technical guy myself (programmer), the kind of fixes that were attempted were amateur at best, but hey I wasn't dealing with a fellow programmer, so from that point of view he done quite well.
It's single core, it's very old code, the programming has only been updated to just keep it going and on the market to keep the money coming in, you can max out the 1 core it uses by just dragging the preset slider too fast, it often lags out, it passes the lag to the daw, memory consumption is a lot also, the list goes on and on and on...

But I do agree with you that VPS Avenger is also not without it's own issues, but feature wise it can do things most of the others (even omni) can't and some it can't. Rapid is far better sounding but you can't do all that you can with Avenger in Rapid.

Would I buy VPS Avenger knowing what I now know... No, would I buy Omnisphere now knowing what I know, also NO.

For sound quality Omnisphere's sample base is huge and has been mastered very well and they spent a lot of time crafting those sounds for stereo imaging which gives them that bit extra and combined with it's now basic synth and granular capabilities from that point of view it's a very powerful instrument and you can make some great stuff with it... But the other don't come with all that, you got to do it, Avenger can put out some really nice sounds if you know how to use it and Avenger is very old now too.

As for Avenger expansions, I agree with you there, stupid prices, I wouldn't buy one of them even on sale, STOOOOPID prices and not worth it. Which is a good thing, made me learn to use it. I bought some 3rd party expansions it for $5 to $10 however.


Rapid sound great compared to Avenger right out of the box but it has better presets, make something yourself in the 1st 5 mins and your like ooo err... 30 mins later, I'm saying to myself, nice... But Avenger can do things rapid can't and does add a bit more latency than avenger does but Rapid is nicer to use.


But if you want the best imo check out Falcon & Halion 6, they easily blow Omni out of the water for me...

PS. If your a hardware guy check out V9 collection and some of the stuff from CherryAudio.

[Flip64]

If you just want presets - Omnisphere is great. But that's all I use it for as I can't make any sense of how it actually puts sounds together. It's the one VSTi I regret actually buying because it cost a lot and ultimately...I rarely use it.

Yeah, I'm surprised by this too, I find Omni one of the most intuitive to program, but it is conceptually totally different to Avenger (which I also like). The great thing about Avenger is it's (nearly) all there in front of you, dragging, dropping and clicking. The concept of Omni is just to have it very broad and simple on the surface, and you drill down to the detail in anything.

I suspect this ultimately is an individual thing - much like there is no definitive answer to the "which DAW is best?" - it's whatever suits the way your brain works. I have always hated drilling down into menus and sub screens to find parameters to tweak. I guess I think in a 2D way - I need to see it. For the same reason I hated it when mid 80s synths came along, doing away with knobs and sliders and putting everything under multi function buttons and a small handful of knobs or sliders. While I have quite a few VSTis with everything on the main GUI - Avenger just seems very intuitive to how I think, with a huge variety in the sound, if you take the time to delve into it.

I have 2 22" monitors - I have a whole loads of older VSTs which no doubt would struggle to be seen at all on a 34" one. I didn't really think Avenger would be one of those with the options but perhaps it does. But then 34" monitors are not the norm. No doubt a word to their devs might get it going even bigger in an update; it does seem to have many options.

[MegaPixel]

Interesting video on Rapid synth, will give you a taste of what it's capable of...

[DCrown]

Hard to beat imo

[rod_zero]

For the target market of Avenger: Rapid is the closest one with similar features and included content.

Omnisphere and Pigments might be as capable bur their content isn't totally tailored to "EDM ready sounds". Falcon too but being an open architecture makes it the most complex of the bunch.

I think Pigments is becoming steadly a great alternative to Omnisphere, specially as arturia seems commited to keep developing and providing sample content for it.

[zvenx]

I do agree with you with Rapid being the closest..
Rapid plays wonderfully well on my system as in not being a cpu or memory hog..... alas with Avenger I can't say the same.. Not sure how Rapid does it, but wish Avenger had similar loads (since to me it sounds way more appealing to my ear), but Rapid does what it does with little cpu/memory hit.


I think Pigments may match Omnisphere featurewise, but never in sound quality.
Eric Persing et al are top of the food chain, Arturia nowhere close, but that is indeed always personal taste.

rsp

[rod_zero]

I do agree with you with Rapid being the closest..
Rapid plays wonderfully well on my system as in not being a cpu or memory hog..... alas with Avenger I can't say the same.. Not sure how Rapid does it, but wish Avenger had similar loads (since to me it sounds way more appealing to my ear), but Rapid does what it does with little cpu/memory hit.


I think Pigments may match Omnisphere featurewise, but never in sound quality.
Eric Persing et al are top of the food chain, Arturia nowhere close, but that is indeed always personal taste.

rsp

The biggest difference is sound quality between pgiments and Omnisphere is the quality of the samples for sure. I don't think the filters are that much apart.

[zvenx]

I generally am not a fan of arturia filters other than their ms-20.
What I do like on Pigments more than Omnisphere though is UI/UX.
Not that I don't like Omnisphere's gui, just to me Pigments is probably my favourite Gui.

rsp

[ramseysounds]

Nexus?

[ortseam]

Dune3 - I think it's highly worth being mentioned as Avenger competitor

[BBFG#]

I do agree with you with Rapid being the closest..
Rapid plays wonderfully well on my system as in not being a cpu or memory hog..... alas with Avenger I can't say the same.. Not sure how Rapid does it, but wish Avenger had similar loads (since to me it sounds way more appealing to my ear), but Rapid does what it does with little cpu/memory hit.


I think Pigments may match Omnisphere featurewise, but never in sound quality.
Eric Persing et al are top of the food chain, Arturia nowhere close, but that is indeed always personal taste.

rsp

The biggest difference is sound quality between pgiments and Omnisphere is the quality of the samples for sure. I don't think the filters are that much apart.

Omni has a method of sampling that can be self defeating for many things. And once you know it and hear it, it can't be unheard. You could do the same method in Pigments with that same effect (quality).
Omni is what it is; the better sampling now coming from 3rd party developers not using that method.

[moonchunk]

Before the summary list below the synth that I've been waiting for still doesn't exist. The one to end them all for me would feature:
A GUI/UI that works like Bitwigs Grid / Unreal Blueprints / Blender Texture editor, that is modular and infinite on all features, you should only be bound by the limits of your computer not by the instrument. If you want 300 LFOs and 200 MSEGs, then have them (overkill example) but you get my point.

What in my OP is better than VPS Avenger
1. Falcon
2. Rapid Synth

Halion would be a contender but its GUI is just too much of mess and even though it is the only one that can contend with Falcon and does sound great its GUI drives most people away.


Here's what I've found for myself:

VPS Avenger
Pain in the ass licencing system, wish the GUI was a bit more friendly but its ok, this is quite the collection of powerful tools, has dot animation on graph based components (which I find is a very nice thing to have). I don't think its sound quality is that good though. Stupidly expensive sound bank/expansions and they are not that great and not that many presets in them, and doesn't come with many good ones if bought alone, which is good as it forces you to learn it. But its clunky, its preset browser for some reason just annoys me.
- Sound Quality: 7/10
- Features: 8/10
- GUI: 8/10
- Routing: 8/10
- Ease of use: 6.5/10
- CPU Load: 7/10
- Preset browser: 5/10
- Presets shipped with: 1/10


Rapid Synth
Sounds better than VPS Avenger, one of the best sounding instruments out there IMO, but the LFO / etc assigning and editing is a bit of a pain, the list view helps but its limiting. Both Rapid & Avenger need to see how it's done in phase plant & vital etc for a better way of doing things. Needs more LFOs & MSEG etc, Bitwig however does help fill in the gaps with Rapid. I find myself reaching for this more than VPS Avenger as it just sounds a lot better and I like to work from a preset as a template than from init.
- Sound Quality: 9/10
- Features: 8/10
- GUI: 8/10
- Routing: 6.5/10
- Ease of use: 7/10
- CPU Load: 9/10
- Preset browser: 7/10
- Presets shipped with: 9/10


Icarus 2
This is not even on the same level as Rapid Synth or VPS Avenger, it could be, but its limited in so many ways but has the potential to be so much more, but the developers have too many other synths to manage and I don't see them doing much more with this as they haven't had the balls to make the big changes, even going from v1 to v2. Also for the love of god do not buy their preset expansion packs (wave table pack sure/maybe) but the rest is a WTF, I got caught on this and they wont refund you. Presets named leads or bass etc are full on sequences or arps etc, many are drowned in effects. The sound design on 90% of presets shipped with and bought are as if they were made by a random kid they grabbed off the street, sat down in front of FLStudio for the first time and told to make some presets for Icarus 2. (really is that bad) Of those VSTs that could be a contender functional wise with VPS Avenger, this is not it, not by a long shot. This is like aim for the moon, shoot yourself in the foot.
- Sound Quality: 6.5/10
- Features: 5/10
- GUI: 5/10
- Routing: 3/10
- Ease of use: 6.5/10
- CPU Load: 7/10
- Preset browser: 5/10 (has some bugs)
- Presets shipped with: 1/10 (you really need to make your own)



PhasePlant
Love the modularity, probably is the best designed vst out there, lacks some features such as real msegs & arp. But I find that a lot of what I create in it tends to end up the same sounding. It still think it needs some serious optimisation to possibly the assembly level of programming to optimise some of their components as some things which cause little to no added latency in other plugins can eat as much as 10% of the cpu in phaseplant. However PhasePlant is a suite of plugins also which makes it an odd one to evaluate, however over time I find that I will reach for Rapid, Dune 3 or Pigments before firing up PhasePlant but I might use some of its plugins in the rack.
- Sound Quality: 7/10
- Features: 7/10
- GUI: 9.5/10
- Routing: 9/10
- Ease of use: 7/10
- CPU Load: 4/10
- Preset browser: 7/10
- Presets shipped with: 4/10


Anna 2
I get on with this vst well, it sounds great, it quick and to the point and overlooked by many, I often load this up. One of the best preset browsers out there also.
- Sound Quality: 8/10
- Features: 7/10
- GUI: 8/10
- Routing: 7/10
- Ease of use: 8/10
- CPU Load: 8/10
- Preset browser: 8/10
- Presets shipped with: 7/10


Serum
A legend everyone already knows everything about, but I don't find myself using it much these days. Development has stagnated, if you try to organise the wavetable and noise folders you pretty much end up breaking every preset you ever bough and the developers refuse to make something as simple as a search for matching file name for noise / wavetable (a request I made many years ago). Preset authors often use stupid noise, wavetable and folder naming which is annoying. This is the only VST I've ever programmed my own utilities for to clean up presets. You will also find that many presets are copies from others just with minor differences such as the noise removed, some of the mapped macro nobs undone or added etc, and you will find you get presets thrown at you constantly in free newsletters, free sample packs and even purchased sample packs. In the end you end up with 100s of presets which all sound the same, the ones with the macro nobs mapped usually mans you are getting close to the real creator of that preset. Then when your in clean up mode (deletion) your faced with mass preset deletion and serum doesnt do this (another collection of feature I asked for many years ago), so another tool I had to build.
- Sound Quality: 7/10
- Features: 7/10
- GUI: 9/10
- Routing: 7/10
- Ease of use: 8/10
- CPU Load: 8/10
- Preset browser: 8/10
- Presets shipped with: 6/10


Dune 3
A great sounding synth this one, now has a decent preset browser (still not the best), but to my ears this synth sounds great. The old school LCD display could be enhanced to modern day, there's a few things which are limiting and a bit odd but once you know your way around, I often find it puts a smile on my face.
- Sound Quality: 9/10
- Features: 7/10
- GUI: 7/10
- Routing: 5/10
- Ease of use: 7/10
- CPU Load: 8/10
- Preset browser: 7/10
- Presets shipped with: 7/10


Synthmaster 2.9
One of my first synths I purchased but never got on with the GUI or how it works, something just doesn't click with me. It has a huge collection of presets (everything bundle), many of which are great and sound good, but I find myself keeping to the basics with it, rather than ever getting into it.
- Sound Quality: 7.5/10
- Features: 7/10
- GUI: 6/10
- Routing: 4/10
- Ease of use: 6/10
- CPU Load: 8/10
- Preset browser: 7/10
- Presets shipped with: 9/10 (everything bundle)


Spire
Some epic sounds can be created with this beastie but its gui, routing and ease of use is in dire need of modernisation/simplification. Put spire side by side with any of the others I've mentioned here and its, yeesh... oh, oh, get me a bucket... Preset browser is great though. But once you serve your time getting to know it, it's not that bad but still yeesh what a gui.
- Sound Quality: 8.5/10
- Features: 7/10
- GUI: 5/10
- Routing: 4/10
- Ease of use: 5/10
- CPU Load: 8/10
- Preset browser: 7/10
- Presets shipped with: 7/10


Pigments 3
Looks great, sounds great, not the best preset browser but it could be far far worse. Pigments is where I go when I've had enough of Serum, u-he etc, I often find it gives me a new breath of fresh air. It has a nice GUI, and the way it works just puts you on a different track. However its not all good it is extremely cpu hungry at times and is in need of serious optimisation but I don't think Arturia have the programmers that can handle that. It can be limiting at times, finding myself wishing for a few small things here and there but I just like it, I'm glad I got this one. Seems to take longer and longer to load these days.
- Sound Quality: 9/10
- Features: 7/10
- GUI: 8/10
- Routing: 7/10
- Ease of use: 7/10
- CPU Load: 3/10
- Preset browser: 6/10
- Presets shipped with: 7/10


Diva
Looks great, sounds great but can eat the cpu of a supercomputer made in year 3094 for breakfast. And as with all u-he synths one of the best preset browsers you will find.
- Sound Quality: 8/10
- Features: 7/10
- GUI: 8/10
- Routing: 4/10
- Ease of use: 6/10
- CPU Load: 2/10
- Preset browser: 9/10
- Presets shipped with: 6.5/10


Hive
Looks great, sounds great (not as good as Dune or Rapid), the usual great preset browser you get from u-he but there's just things that bug me when using it, a few limitations and menus and niggly things which always make think, why did you do it that way? programmer just got tired or couldn't be arsed in this area? The devil is in the detail and they didn't give everything the same love they should have with this one.
- Sound Quality: 8/10
- Features: 7/10
- GUI: 8/10
- Routing: 6/10
- Ease of use: 6/10
- CPU Load: 8/10
- Preset browser: 9/10
- Presets shipped with: 5/10


Zebra & ZebraHZ
Looks great, sounds great and the great preset browser you get from u-he. This one took me a bit of working out to get used to, but once I did, love it and find myself coming back to it a lot.
- Sound Quality: 9/10
- Features: 7/10
- GUI: 7/10
- Routing: 7/10
- Ease of use: 7/10
- CPU Load: 8/10
- Preset browser: 9/10
- Presets shipped with: 6.5/10


Vital
One of the best looking vsts around and sounds great too, a true serum killer? hmm kinda, but I think it compliments it more than kills it. Can be very very heavy on the cpu and makes some good use on the GPU. Visually this thing is a work of art, preset borwser is good, not the best, but more than does the job. And most of all, insanely it's FREE, I bought it for the extras and to support the developer and do love using it. However it not all great, it needs more lfo's, msegs etc but if your bitwig user then you are given a boost. wavetable, noise, lfo, preset file organisation is far more organised than Serum's which is good.
- Sound Quality: 8.5/10
- Features: 7/10
- GUI: 9.8/10
- Routing: 6/10
- Ease of use: 7.5/10
- CPU Load: 4/10
- Preset browser: 8/10
- Presets shipped with FREE Version: 5/10 (but go on the forums, each month many are shared for free and sound awesome)
- Presets shipped with Pro Purchase Version: 7.5/10


Falcon
I do love this power house of an instrument, its still got more to offer me and more for me to learn even after using it for a very long time. It is a beast and yes it eats VPS Avenger for breakfast. There is nothing to rival this one for me, but really really wish it was built in modular fashion like the blueprint system in unreal engine or blender's texture designer, fully vector based, animations from serum, phaseplant and vital, make some serious use of the GPU and not just the CPU for audio processing also, then it would be the alpha and omega of instruments.
- Sound Quality: 9/10
- Features: 9.5/10
- GUI: 7/10
- Routing: 7/10
- Ease of use: 6.5/10
- CPU Load: 7/10
- Preset browser: 6.5/10
- Presets shipped with: 8/10


Halion 6
It has great sound quality, it is the only one that can try to compete with Falcon and yes it also eats Avenger for breakfast, however the GUI and usability of it has been made a real mess, but steinberg have never been good at GUI/UI IMO. If and when I do use it (not often), I do usually like what I come up with using it, but I go there less and less these days. Another thing is font size is annoyingly small, 4K at 100% scaling halion has me using a telescope to see what I'm doing, steinberg are still living in 1999.
- Sound Quality: 9/10
- Features: 9.5/10
- GUI: 3/10
- Routing: 3/10
- Ease of use: 2/10
- CPU Load: 7/10
- Preset browser: 3/10
- Presets shipped with: 6.5/10



If I had to do it all over again, what would I do?

• Bitwig
• Falcon + most of the uvi expansions and some 3rd party ones
• Rapid Synth + 3 or 4 expansions
• Dune 3
• Diva & Zebra
• Anna 2
• Pigments 3
• Vital (Pro)
• Serum (this is a big maybe however)
• Cableguys Shaperbox 2
• NI Komplete Ultimate xx
• And a good few 3rd party kontakt libraries

I just wanted to quote a long post. Just kidding!

You're 100% right about Rapid Sounding great. I just recently purchased it and I'm considering whether to upgrade to Vengeance 2, and in the demos I'm hearing it again - it JUST DOESN"T compete with the quality of sound coming from Parawave Rapid.

[moonchunk]

Taste really is subjective... some people think Rapid and Falcon sound better than Avenger?

My two biggest issues with Avenger, well three... the price of their expansions, the every 3 month check in but most importantly it is a cpu hog especially at low latencies like I work at.

But for sure the sound is not its limitation at all for me...
It would need a Dune 3, or the u-he synths or omnisphere to sound better to me.

rsp

I think Rapid just has far better sound quality, everything that comes out of it just sounds better, not sure why. Kind of makes Avenger sound flat and a bit early 2000s mp3 lol, but I would like to see routing done way better as per phaseplant, vital, serum etc etc etc or blue print editor in unreal engine.

Omnisphere, I've never got on with it... Its a preset warehouse for me... I also find it slow and clunky, I was on support for nearly 3 weeks just trying to get it to stop lagging, never did solve that issue. It does have good / decent sound quality however but I wouldn't buy any expansions or extras for it, maybe an update when it goes to v3... But I don't even know about that... Got so much other stuff that covers everything it does and does a better job at it.

You hit the nail on the head!

[havran]

Eleven pages on, and it seems no-one has actually addressed the original question about footing.