Ultra Audio - Ultra (A fancy Vital-style synth that popped up out of nowhere)

[ultra_audio]

- Even at the High Quality setting, there is a lot of aliasing on oscillators.. much more so than I hear from Vital for instance.

I feel I should chime in on the aliasing comment...

We spent a fair bit of time on anti aliasing. You can get a perfect clean signal if you're prepared to use a lot of CPU to do it.

I personally think a level of aliasing where you can see it in graphs, with reflections 75 - 90 db quieter than the main harmonics, is the correct level to aim for.

I don't think there's any real world case where you would hear any artefacts at this level - you'd need to run a pitch sweep on a saw wave, in the manner I've done here.

Anyway below are sweep test results from a few synths. The saw wave harmonics are yellow and all move upwards as the note increases in pitch. Aliasing is the dark purple lines that don't follow the main pitch / bounce off the top.

Ultra's Analog and Wavetable Osc aliasing are both on par with Pigments.







Interestingly, the 'worst' performer in the tests I made was Omnisphere, where the aliasing is in the low end on low notes. However, Omnisphere is awesome and I don't hear a lot of complaints about it's sound quality.



All of this is a bit silly because these are very simple waveforms and once you start adding warps, etc to the mixture, some level of aliasing is inevitable.

Here is Serum 2 and Ultra with a bend warp on the saw wave. There is some aliasing on the sweeps. But I've never made a patch with a warp on it and stopped in my tracks because it is technically 'bad' to have aliasing.




I quite like pixel peeping to be honest But I do stand by out anti aliasing efforts.

[Benjamin923]

These are fun figures. How did you make them?

[ultra_audio]

To make these graphs, I make a saw patch in each of the synths, and make it sweep from 20hz to 20kHz.
I then render it out and load it into izotope RX.

The waveform is the blue and the orange is the FFT view.

[Funky40]

The UltraWave oscillator is something that no other synth has. I'm hesitant to link to this video because the UI has been updated a lot since I made it, but this is a good explanation

Very cool! The kick drum example is killer!

FWIW, you might be better off lowering the initial cost and not offering lifetime upgrades. Upgrades are a significant source of income for most companies.

This!

+1, This !

[kraster]

FWIW, you might be better off lowering the initial cost and not offering lifetime upgrades. Upgrades are a significant source of income for most companies.

I personally like the Arturia Pigments model, where all the upgrades are free - and Serum really made a big call making version 2 free, even though it's a very different synth.

On the other end of the spectrum, Omnisphere upgraded to version 3 and it cost quite a bit.

I personally think making the product better and better over time will make it more attractive to new users, and is probably better for us in the long run than any extra income we might have received. I love this synth so I think this is the way to go.

I think it's difficult to draw comparisons between Ultra (or equivalent) and Omnisphere since Omnisphere places a huge emphasis on presets and in reality that makes up a large part of what you're paying for.

If Ultra shipped with 18,000 unique patches I'd imagine the price would be considerably higher.

Ultra's pricing and store model reminds me of Minimal Audio's Current or Tone 2's Icarus where there's an emphasis on store bought presets.

Either way, if you're committed to a free lifetime upgrade model like Pigments that's fantastic news and makes the discounted intro price much more attractive.

I'm seriously impressed with the Ultrawave oscillator. I think we all have more samples than we can ever deal with and anything that can exploit them is a winner and the Ultrawave is one of the most impressive I've come across.

I'm a strong believer that modern synths are distinguished more by how they approach basic sound design (oscillator mainly) than inherent sound quality. There are few modern synths that actually sound bad so adding something novel in terms of fundamental design is always attractive to me.

Anyway, I like what I see and hear so far so it's worth a purchase.

[kraster]

The UltraWave oscillator is something that no other synth has. I'm hesitant to link to this video because the UI has been updated a lot since I made it, but this is a good explanation

Very cool! The kick drum example is killer!

FWIW, you might be better off lowering the initial cost and not offering lifetime upgrades. Upgrades are a significant source of income for most companies.

I think having a synth that's future proofed through lifetime updates but having a slightly higher initial outlay is a better prospect for the customer.

And 149 bucks isn't that crazy if updates are free.

[bmanic]

- Even at the High Quality setting, there is a lot of aliasing on oscillators.. much more so than I hear from Vital for instance.

I feel I should chime in on the aliasing comment...

We spent a fair bit of time on anti aliasing. You can get a perfect clean signal if you're prepared to use a lot of CPU to do it...

Now this is DATA I can get behind. I was simply going by listening at high notes with some warp and distortion modifiers on the oscillators and got a lot of what I thought was unrelated overtones. It's perfectly possible I'm totally wrong though and it just shapes the waveform in a way that sounded like inharmonics generated by aliasing. If that's the case, my apologies for making assumptions as I really did not do any measurements.

I don't have Ultra demo installed any more as the simplistic modulation system is just not my cup of tea but if you could confirm your anti-aliasing works not just on pure waves but on modified stuff too then I can confidently say I was totally wrong.

[Sakke80]

Just got this yesterday. I was initially a bit worried if it would overlap too much with my Icarus, but no. This has very different timbre, and is faster to work with. It feels like a mix of Dune, Serum, and avenger, except the Ultra has more analogish sound if needed. About fx, I like the chorus, delay, and reverb, very lush imo. First it felt weird that the fx have very few algoritms, like reverb with only plate and hall, but they're flexible enough to get lots of different reverbs out. Haven't yet had time for more thorough testing, but so far it's well worth discount price, and didn't notice any problems with performance either.

[ultra_audio]

I don't have Ultra demo installed any more as the simplistic modulation system is just not my cup of tea...

Thanks for trying it out. By the way, we are thinking of enhancing the mod system. I've realised that we need some kind of curve control for each link between the source and the destination.
If we had something similar on the aux, that would be enough to adjust how much the aux affected it. Or perhaps the Vital approach is simpler? I'd be keen to hear your thoughts.

[ultra_audio]

Just got this yesterday. I was initially a bit worried if it would overlap too much with my Icarus, but no. This has very different timbre, and is faster to work with. It feels like a mix of Dune, Serum, and avenger, except the Ultra has more analogish sound if needed. About fx, I like the chorus, delay, and reverb, very lush imo. First it felt weird that the fx have very few algoritms, like reverb with only plate and hall, but they're flexible enough to get lots of different reverbs out. Haven't yet had time for more thorough testing, but so far it's well worth discount price, and didn't notice any problems with performance either.

Glad you like it. We are planning more FX. I have been wanting a spring reverb actually. A room would also be cool. Let me know what other FX you think need more coverage.

[whassup]

Vital is the benchmark for me regarding workflow, modulation and GUI.
Your Ultrawave oscillator seems very promising.

[icaria36]

Happy to answer any questions you have about it...

Just curious, are you considering offering a Linux build as well, no matter how unsupported / community supported it would be?

[kraster]

Just got this yesterday. I was initially a bit worried if it would overlap too much with my Icarus, but no. This has very different timbre, and is faster to work with. It feels like a mix of Dune, Serum, and avenger, except the Ultra has more analogish sound if needed. About fx, I like the chorus, delay, and reverb, very lush imo. First it felt weird that the fx have very few algoritms, like reverb with only plate and hall, but they're flexible enough to get lots of different reverbs out. Haven't yet had time for more thorough testing, but so far it's well worth discount price, and didn't notice any problems with performance either.

Glad you like it. We are planning more FX. I have been wanting a spring reverb actually. A room would also be cool. Let me know what other FX you think need more coverage.

First of all, let me say I think the synth is fantastic. Very easy to use and the Ultrawave is a seriously brilliant concept.

I absolutely love that you can use the pitch and amplitude envelopes of the Ultrawave as modulation sources as well as the amplitude of the sampler.

A few questions and observations.

Is there a way of stacking sounds in the Ultrwave Map? ie. Having more than one Ultrawave play at the same time.

I can see that you can interpolate between notes and velocity but if a sound occupies the same range it seems to favour one.

I'm looking for a way of playing more than one Ultrawave sound per key regardless of pitch or velocity.

Having a send control to the A and B buses would be very useful imho as well as being able to route A and B to direct out so you have three independent routing outputs.

I'm not wild about the distortions. They're all too full on and gritty even on minimum drive settings. Some more gentle saturation or clipping algos would be cool. Some kind of dimension expander for stereo spreading would be nice!

I think the Unison on the Super could have different options for various tunings like Octave spread, Octaves and fifth etc.

I'm getting a pretty repeatable crash to desktop if I replace the attack section in the Ultrawave on an existing preset. That's on Ableton Live 12.3.2, VST 3, Mac Silicon on Sonoma. I have a crash log if you need it.

[zerocrossing]

I think it's difficult to draw comparisons between Ultra (or equivalent) and Omnisphere since Omnisphere places a huge emphasis on presets and in reality that makes up a large part of what you're paying for.

I'm not a huge preset guy, but for me Omnisphere is more about the sample content, which is a lot, and more importantly, interesting. If you consider the prices of exotic sample libraries, Omnisphere doesn't look very expensive at all.

[dune_rave]

I've just tried the demo. It's a nice synth.