New by 112dB: Cascade

[JoeCat]

Was hoping for an intro sale also.

The intro sale lasted until September 1st:

Cascade is available is available for Windows and Mac (VST/AU/AAX/standalone) for the price of €179 (Europe) / $179 (worldwide). An introductory price of €99 / $99 is valid until September 1st, 2016.

I stand corrected - that price was in fact listed on rekkerd (for example) at the release.

Not a lot of press action.

[Robmobius]

If it goes back to $99 at some point in a sale, or something, I'll take a punt on it.

Yeah, very little hype about this. Poor marketing...

[Numanoid]

I like plugs light on CPU, this Q & A stated in the recent interview, doesn't encourage me to burn a lot of money on this plug

As CPU power increases and technology develops, how do you see this style of 'delay network' synthesis evolving in the future?

"It doesn't come cheap, and I worked quite hard to optimise DSP using the Streaming SIMD Extensions (SSE). A synthesizer like this wouldn't have been possible ten years ago. I still had to skip some features with the CPU resources given, and I hope that I can use more in the future."

[Neon Breath]

Great concept, on paper.

That cascade synthesis thing based on a complex delay network that can densify a sound up to 5832 times sounds indeed really cool and new. Probably is too, but translated into sounds, meh. Sounds pretty ordinary, I don’t hear anything out of this world or really new unfortunately. Sounds too generic, in a blind test it could be any other synths... Maybe that’s why it passed under the radar since there are so many great synths outhere.

[Sound Author]

First off, I'd like to thank 112dB for a very generous 60-day evaluation licence. Some developers don't even offer a demo of their products, so that was a nice surprise

As for the Cascade engine itself, I'm impressed by what you can do with high density settings and a pinch of modulation. Some of the strings and piano presets show off this new "sound density synthesis" concept very well I think, and to the untrained ear, you might think your were listening to a physical modelling synth.

Unfortunately, the CPU demands are quite limiting. Hopefully significant optimizations will be implemented in the foreseeable future. Mod-wheel automation scales the entire range of assigned parameters. It would be nice if there was a way to adjust depth of modulation. Those are my biggest gripes. Other than that, I think Cascade is off to a nice start.