VSTis as good as hardware? Similar to Access Virus Quality?

[fugga]

ATTN soundpalace:
did you reach a verdict? would really like to know your overall result / opinion.

I saw that some people mention Creamware pulsar plugs, and in my opinion these plugs are so close to the virus its ridiculous.
But pulsar is more of a dsp plug I guess, so it don't count.

[fgimian]

ATTN soundpalace:
did you reach a verdict? would really like to know your overall result / opinion.

I saw that some people mention Creamware pulsar plugs, and in my opinion these plugs are so close to the virus its ridiculous.
But pulsar is more of a dsp plug I guess, so it don't count.

Honestly, I was hoping a lot of the hardware gurus would post more audio samples.

I'd be happy to post some things I can do with soft synths if you like, but I doubt that'll help.

Currently, I still personally believe (by what I've heard), that the Virus is indeed better than most VSTis, especially for the fact that 1 synth can create all sounds you'd need, while in VSTi land, you'll need 10.

While trying all the softsynths mentioned however, I can conclude the following...

- DiscoDSP Discovery, Toxic, Korg stuff, Zebra2 and actually Synth1 ... are all of top of quality for leads and basses.
- z3ta, Toxic, Virsyn stuff are great for pads and evolving sounds although the oscs in z3ta and Virsyn sound terrible when played on their own.

I have decided to continue using Synth1 for all my synth needs, after having used Reason's subtractor for years, and now switched to Synth1 as my master synth, I am getting many positive comments about the quality difference in my music ... (this probably is also due to the fact that I'm a little better at mixing than I used to be too).

Please let me know if you would like to hear what I can produce with software, and I'll do my best to post a sample

Fots

[bryanf]

sound palace, do you work for Access? Because I need a virus now

[D-Fusion]

Yes please post a sample soundpalace

[Josmoker]

While trying all the softsynths mentioned however, I can conclude the following...

- DiscoDSP Discovery, Toxic, Korg stuff, Zebra2 and actually Synth1 ... are all of top of quality for leads and basses.
- z3ta, Toxic, Virsyn stuff are great for pads and evolving sounds although the oscs in z3ta and Virsyn sound terrible when played on their own.

ahem
I'll be so bold to say that this oversimplifies.

Cheers, Jo

[fgimian]

sound palace, do you work for Access? Because I need a virus now

I wish !

Josmoker, yep definitely a little rough, I haven't described the filters, envelopes .etc, but just giving a rough top level view of my thoughts.

Please feel free to share yours too

I'll put together some demos now
Fots

[vvanrij]

-The virus is NOT the mother of all synths, its just a very popular, and absolutely gorgeous (the c was hot) instrument, but not the one-in-all solution

I think Virus can be one in all solution (for electronic music). One of the reasons Virus gained popularity is becase of rouneded off feature set. Poly Evolver sure as hell sounds better at typical synth sounds but you'll be hard pressed to make whole tracks with it. Not so with Virus. Massive polyphony, fx per part means that you can embark on creating LPs just with Virus. Some people DO exactly that with excellent results.

By this, you are limiting yourself.. I think we all agree that the virus can't make all sounds as good as other synths! It might make all kind off different sounds, but it doesn't mean it can make basslines as good as like a real Moog? And the JP8080 is also still one of the 'basis' instruments in alot of trance producers studios, and a virus just can't sound like one

[pepelogu]

-The virus is NOT the mother of all synths, its just a very popular, and absolutely gorgeous (the c was hot) instrument, but not the one-in-all solution

I think Virus can be one in all solution (for electronic music). One of the reasons Virus gained popularity is becase of rouneded off feature set. Poly Evolver sure as hell sounds better at typical synth sounds but you'll be hard pressed to make whole tracks with it. Not so with Virus. Massive polyphony, fx per part means that you can embark on creating LPs just with Virus. Some people DO exactly that with excellent results.

By this, you are limiting yourself.. I think we all agree that the virus can't make all sounds as good as other synths! It might make all kind off different sounds, but it doesn't mean it can make basslines as good as like a real Moog? And the JP8080 is also still one of the 'basis' instruments in alot of trance producers studios, and a virus just can't sound like one

Still if one would buy *one* hardware synth, a Virus would be a good choice because it does so much, so well.

[The Chase]

-The virus is NOT the mother of all synths, its just a very popular, and absolutely gorgeous (the c was hot) instrument, but not the one-in-all solution

I think Virus can be one in all solution (for electronic music). One of the reasons Virus gained popularity is becase of rouneded off feature set. Poly Evolver sure as hell sounds better at typical synth sounds but you'll be hard pressed to make whole tracks with it. Not so with Virus. Massive polyphony, fx per part means that you can embark on creating LPs just with Virus. Some people DO exactly that with excellent results.

By this, you are limiting yourself.. I think we all agree that the virus can't make all sounds as good as other synths! It might make all kind off different sounds, but it doesn't mean it can make basslines as good as like a real Moog? And the JP8080 is also still one of the 'basis' instruments in alot of trance producers studios, and a virus just can't sound like one

Still if one would buy *one* hardware synth, a Virus would be a good choice because it does so much, so well.

For the price I'd just buy the best synth I could for $500 or so and then a bunch of effects for it

[fgimian]

What I'm preparing, rather than random sound demos, is the process in which I go through testing synths. I have selected a handful of synths mentinoed here...

Albino 3 (seems popular)
Synth1
Zebra2
DisoDSP Discovery
ToxicIII
Minimonsta

My process is as follows...

1) Test the oscillators, no aliasing is to be heard at all, and an FFT analyser is used to confirm that all is looking healthy.
2) Test a 24 db / oct low-pass filter with a single osc at high resonance. During this phase we also see how the filter envelope reacts.
3) Test unison ... I use unison everywhere, and so do most trance producers (judging by the sounds I hear in most tracks).

I also note...
- The GUI
- Featureset
- CPU Usage

I'll post back the results soon. This may seem harsh, but if any synth fails at step 1 or step 2, it is eliminated.



Let the battle begin
Fots

[tony tony chopper]

Here I'm still waiting for the other guy's MIDI score

[fgimian]

Please download my tests at

http://www.yousendit.com/transfer.php?a ... a9744d0611

If you have any trouble with this link, please try...

http://www.yousendit.com/transfer.php?a ... 9229786107

All included files are WAV 24 bit so that the tests are as accurate as possible. All produced using demos of the software, with the synths that have interrupted output, I had to be careful to freeze the take just after the noise burst or silence occurs.

Stage 1: Sawtooth waveform, check for aliasing

Albino sounded terrible here, I had noticed this with the oscillators in Blue also, I hope Rob can work on getting these oscs a lot more alias free. The synth actually ate up a lot of power too considering the quality of the osc. Eliminated.

Toxic has very good oscillators, however, the lower notes lose the bite of the notes. checking this out in a FFT, it is easy to see that the aliasing isn't 100% on the lower notes. Very good, but to make things easier, we'll eliminate this. I actually really like Toxic for the record.

All the rest (including Synth1) had very little, if not no aliasing.

Stage 2: Filter 24 db (high resonance)

All these samples have their own flavour here. Regardless of the fact that Minimonsta has, what appears to be a very analogue sounding filter, on sweeps, I find it a little worse than the rest. Discovery, had a very fast envelope. Synth1 had a little less character than the others.

Stage 3: Filter Envelope test (no resonance)

Again, all the synths sound good here, however the filter env amount is not set to max on all synths because Minimonsta couldn't quite match this so I tried to make the test fair. This must be a characteristic of the Moog itself.

Stage 4: Unison test

Although Discovery says it has unison, I only found the few unison options in the menu, which weren't really a proper unison, so I couldn't really test out Discovery here. If you know a good way to do unison quickly in Discovery, please let me know.

Minimonsta has an issue with unison, when freezing this take, it appears that osc phase on each of the detunes oscs was set to 0 to begin with, which is why we end up with the flanger sound towards the start of the clip. The only way around this seems to be recording some dummy notes before a song starts. Still, it sounds good after the flange clears.

However, to my surprise, Zebra sounds quite thin, Synth1 wins this hands down in my opinion, sounds top end.

All synths were set to use 4 voice unisons to be fair. Zebra (Quad mode), Synth1 (detune osc 1 with itself, add unison which doubles this, i.e. 4 voices), Minimonsta (used unison feature, set polyphony to 4)

The greatest thing about Synth1 here is that you can have polyphonic unison, so I could easily play a pad sound with this huge sound. CPU usage was substantially lower than other synths too. Even the Korg legacy synths do not allow polyphonic unison. Toxic does however.

Please share your thoughts.
Fots

[tony tony chopper]

Plz test Sytrus as it should do everything your test wants. Can't do the test myself as it'd be biased.

[fgimian]

To be honest, the workflow of Sytrus confuses me bigtime, I don't think I'd even know where to start when creating an empty preset

Thanks for reminding me though... in terms of GUI, I think that Discovery has the best GUI of the synths I tested, very easy to read and use.

Fots

[Urs]

However, to my surprise, Zebra sounds quite thin

Have you detuned the oscillator and tried "Reset" in the Phase-tab?

Urs