Zero Delay Feedback Filter (How to test if your synth has a )- Xils-Lab White Paper -

[Frantz]

To me it is like speakers, some may be really great at a modest price, but if you REALLY want to get to audiophile levels of precision you need to 'spend the money' in synths this seems to be system resources. I'm certain good sound can come from less, but it is a matter of good vs. great I do believe. Hapilly some developers are taking the approach to get the economy stuff out there as well, Urs just has different priorities

I am more interested in a moderate CPU, workhorse synth that sounds very good rather than a resource intensive audiophile synth. In other words, for every day driving I find a Toyota to be more practical than a Lamborghini. I think the developer that builds the best Toyota will do very well for himself.

[braj]

To me it is like speakers, some may be really great at a modest price, but if you REALLY want to get to audiophile levels of precision you need to 'spend the money' in synths this seems to be system resources. I'm certain good sound can come from less, but it is a matter of good vs. great I do believe. Hapilly some developers are taking the approach to get the economy stuff out there as well, Urs just has different priorities

I am more interested in a moderate CPU, workhorse synth that sounds very good rather than a resource intensive audiophile synth. In other words, for every day driving I find a Toyota to be more practical than a Lamborghini. I think the developer that builds the best Toyota will do very well for himself.

And I don't disagree I want both myself.

[Kriminal]

My machine isnt the best, but ive never found Diva to be much of s cpu hog
Never understood what the complaints were about

[carrieres]

My machine isnt the best, but ive never found Diva to be much of s cpu hog
Never understood what the complaints were about

because you don't play chords

[Urs]

I suspect it's related to the thing they call "stiffness" actually. This is interesting to me, since given a fixed CPU budget, one might have to choose between "smooth" vs. "accurate".

True. Don't worry about cpu budget. Take pride in cycles and concentrate on sound. Why else would one bother?

Well, I think for practically every plugin I've released, someone has complained about the CPU use. I just try my best to spend most of it on whatever methods appear to give the best bang for the buck.

When we started doing numerical solvers for delayless feedback we honestly thought 1 voice per core. This has changed ever since, but we wouldn't have got there had we been afraid of cpu budget.

The world is of course diverse and full of trade offs in every direction. The good thing in terms of cpu budget is, the hog of today is the lightweight of tomorrow

[pdxindy]

To me it is like speakers, some may be really great at a modest price, but if you REALLY want to get to audiophile levels of precision you need to 'spend the money' in synths this seems to be system resources. I'm certain good sound can come from less, but it is a matter of good vs. great I do believe. Hapilly some developers are taking the approach to get the economy stuff out there as well, Urs just has different priorities

I am more interested in a moderate CPU, workhorse synth that sounds very good rather than a resource intensive audiophile synth. In other words, for every day driving I find a Toyota to be more practical than a Lamborghini. I think the developer that builds the best Toyota will do very well for himself.

There are plenty of workhorse synths that sound very good with moderate cpu already. We have already excellent Toyotas.

[Kriminal]

My machine isnt the best, but ive never found Diva to be much of s cpu hog
Never understood what the complaints were about

because you don't play chords

of course not, i dont make prog rock

no, seriously tho, i can get 6 instances playing pads/bass/leads etc aswell as other synths happily in a song

[dreamkeeper]

In other words, for every day driving I find a Toyota to be more practical than a Lamborghini.

And how would you know?

[Kriminal]

To me it is like speakers, some may be really great at a modest price, but if you REALLY want to get to audiophile levels of precision you need to 'spend the money' in synths this seems to be system resources. I'm certain good sound can come from less, but it is a matter of good vs. great I do believe. Hapilly some developers are taking the approach to get the economy stuff out there as well, Urs just has different priorities

I am more interested in a moderate CPU, workhorse synth that sounds very good rather than a resource intensive audiophile synth. In other words, for every day driving I find a Toyota to be more practical than a Lamborghini. I think the developer that builds the best Toyota will do very well for himself.

so you settle for second best to save on cpu ?

personally, sound will win everytime, and sometimes it might be a synth edit creation, sometimes it might be a hardware synth, but whatever cpu usage is never a problem, its something i can always get around to achieve my goal.

[Kriminal]

In other words, for every day driving I find a Toyota to be more practical than a Lamborghini.

And how would you know?

i dont think you actually need to drive a Lamborghini to know that, its common sense really.

[AdmiralQuality]

I suspect it's related to the thing they call "stiffness" actually. This is interesting to me, since given a fixed CPU budget, one might have to choose between "smooth" vs. "accurate".

True. Don't worry about cpu budget. Take pride in cycles and concentrate on sound. Why else would one bother?

Well, I think for practically every plugin I've released, someone has complained about the CPU use. I just try my best to spend most of it on whatever methods appear to give the best bang for the buck.

Unless Moore's law suddenly grinds to a halt, I don't think we're doing our jobs right unless we release products that are perceived as a bit challenging to current CPUs.

Remember all the flak I used to get about Poly-Ana being a CPU hog? Well five and a half years later, I can't remember the last time I've heard somebody say that. I tried to explain to people at the time that I designed it for tomorrow's computers, not yesterday's, and they nearly ripped my head off for it. I was still on a P4 when I originally developed it, and I could get about 8 voices at medium quality level before the crackles started. Now I'm on a Core2Quad Q9300 @ 2.5 GHz which itself is several years old, and I simply can't run into a CPU limit with a single instance of Poly-Ana. Even at 16X oversampling and all 12 voices going.

Another reason it's faster is due to improved optimization, it might at this point be nearly twice as efficient as it was on original release (been a long time since I measured, lately I usually only check a new release against the latest release just to make sure its not getting worse).

My point is, it only gets better. So aiming high is a good strategy for product longevity. On the other hand, a plug-in certainly shouldn't be made unnecessarily inefficient if it doesn't pay off in some audible way. But as we're presented with more and more power, it's incumbent upon us to take advantage of it and make more powerful products.

Or not. Lo-fi and super-efficient is a niche too. But I know which I'd rather be known for.

Back to topic, has anyone done a test looking for "the dip" on your various virtual and real analogs?

[Lotuzia]

To me it is like speakers, some may be really great at a modest price, but if you REALLY want to get to audiophile levels of precision you need to 'spend the money' in synths this seems to be system resources. I'm certain good sound can come from less, but it is a matter of good vs. great I do believe. Hapilly some developers are taking the approach to get the economy stuff out there as well, Urs just has different priorities

I am more interested in a moderate CPU, workhorse synth that sounds very good rather than a resource intensive audiophile synth. In other words, for every day driving I find a Toyota to be more practical than a Lamborghini. I think the developer that builds the best Toyota will do very well for himself.

And I don't disagree I want both myself.

This would be assuming that there is a linear function CpuCost/quality.

[braj]

I'm a guitartist and I'll tell you some guitars suck, they go out of tune easily, have warped necks, bad workmanship, cheap parts. Same with software, some plugins suck: they crash, have poorly designed menus, broken preset systems, frustrating copy protection, terrible support from the deveopers. Crap exists, it is not all subjective opinion.

[braj]

To me it is like speakers, some may be really great at a modest price, but if you REALLY want to get to audiophile levels of precision you need to 'spend the money' in synths this seems to be system resources. I'm certain good sound can come from less, but it is a matter of good vs. great I do believe. Hapilly some developers are taking the approach to get the economy stuff out there as well, Urs just has different priorities

I am more interested in a moderate CPU, workhorse synth that sounds very good rather than a resource intensive audiophile synth. In other words, for every day driving I find a Toyota to be more practical than a Lamborghini. I think the developer that builds the best Toyota will do very well for himself.

And I don't disagree I want both myself.

This would be assuming that there is a linear function CpuCost/quality.

Whoa, what happened to the essay that used to be part of this post? That sure got truncated! Sure makes my response to you seem out of the blue.

[AdmiralQuality]

To me it is like speakers, some may be really great at a modest price, but if you REALLY want to get to audiophile levels of precision you need to 'spend the money' in synths this seems to be system resources. I'm certain good sound can come from less, but it is a matter of good vs. great I do believe. Hapilly some developers are taking the approach to get the economy stuff out there as well, Urs just has different priorities

I am more interested in a moderate CPU, workhorse synth that sounds very good rather than a resource intensive audiophile synth. In other words, for every day driving I find a Toyota to be more practical than a Lamborghini. I think the developer that builds the best Toyota will do very well for himself.

And I don't disagree I want both myself.

This would be assuming that there is a linear function CpuCost/quality.

Whoa, what happened to the essay that used to be part of this post? That sure got truncated! Sure makes my response to you seem out of the blue.

Nearly caught me too. I was about to start dissing certain guitar manufacturers to prove a point. Probably best to just leave it be though.