All good things come to those who wait.. the Synth Squad 2 thread

[Pyrotek45]

Oh, Strobe 2 pushes boundaries all right. Perhaps not the same ones as Spire, Serum or Zebra, but nevertheless it does.

The aim was to create the synth equivalent of a well-balanced guitar, a nice chef's knife or a good camera. It's not about the number of features, but how they work together.

Creating a basic bread and butter synth is pushing the boundaries? With all due respect to you and your work, I think you and I have separate definitions for the word boundaries.

You have to realize, effort does not equal value

and neither does price.

I am not to sure what you mean, you're just stating something I already said. But I will rephrase it so even you an understand. Just because you put a lot of work into something does not mean the final product will be the same value to you as it will be to consumers. You must look at the product by itself and try to make an unbiased estimation as to what the average person would be willing to buy it for. Now I have, as many others, stated that the asking price and the upgrade price is too steep! That tells me that it has been priced too high for what is in essence a basic bread and butter synth, that alone cost more than Sylenth1, arguably the most-basic synth. To me, it feels like a money-grab. But hey, it's their synth and they can sell it for whatever they want (I hate repeating myself as I already said this, people just don't read I suppose...)

[4damind]

Ok, tuned Strobe 2 a bit and now it's ready to replace Strobe 1

The bass is of course from Strobe 2 and in the middle this "running part" is also layered with a Strobe 2 unison pluck which replaced Sylenth for me (btw. there are also some other layered plucks from Synthmaster and Matrix 12)

Some stuff I'm working on...
https://soundcloud.com/52degree/06-fran ... am/s-pjTFJ

[SJ_Digriz]

So a friend with an i7-4790k just tested it.. 6.8 single-core Synthmark on that thing.

My poor old 2008 Mac Pro ("Harpertown" @ 2.8GHz) barely manages 1.5.

Still, shows the optimizations are doing what they're supposed to!

thanks for that info. I'll be sure to run the test tonight.

My i7 980-X clocks in at 2.3. Not too bad for a 5 year old system. Also, I can crank it to 4Ghz. So, technically I should get a bit better performance when I'm running in hot mode.

No AVX support obviously. But I do have 6(12) cores. I wonder if it will scale well with multiple instances.

[Angus_FX]

My i7 980-X clocks in at 2.3. Not too bad for a 5 year old system. Also, I can crank it to 4Ghz. So, technically I should get a bit better performance when I'm running in hot mode.

No AVX support obviously. But I do have 6(12) cores. I wonder if it will scale well with multiple instances.

Yes, it'll scale nicely across multiple cores provided your host has sensible load balancing. Most of them do, nowadays.

It's much, much kinder to L1/L2 cache & memory bandwidth than v1 ever was.

Creating a basic bread and butter synth is pushing the boundaries? With all due respect to you and your work, I think you and I have separate definitions for the word boundaries.

I think bread and butter are something we come across often enough in life that they're worth doing well - and for some people, paying a bit more for. I've used the synths people are drawing comparison to (and Strobe 1, obviously), this offers far more in terms of usability - and for those who are going to be investing significant time in learning it & creating a lot of music with it, the price shouldn't be a barrier. Bear in mind Strobe 1 has been around since 2009 with several free maintenance upgrades including 64-bit. This is effectively a brand new product based on an old, good, popular design. The GUI? All new. The presets? All new. The DSP code? Mostly new. The effects? Mixture of old and new cores, all new UI. Browser? New. Arpeggiator-sequencer? Yup. Et cetera.

[Pyrotek45]

Creating a basic bread and butter synth is pushing the boundaries? With all due respect to you and your work, I think you and I have separate definitions for the word boundaries.

I think bread and butter are something we come across often enough in life that they're worth doing well - and for some people, paying a bit more for. I've used the synths people are drawing comparison to (and Strobe 1, obviously), this offers far more in terms of usability - and for those who are going to be investing significant time in learning it & creating a lot of music with it, the price shouldn't be a barrier. Bear in mind Strobe 1 has been around since 2009 with several free maintenance upgrades including 64-bit. This is effectively a brand new product based on an old, good, popular design. The GUI? All new. The presets? All new. The DSP code? Mostly new. The effects? Mixture of old and new cores, all new UI. Browser? New. Arpeggiator-sequencer? Yup. Et cetera.

Like I said we have different ideas on the use of the word boundaries. New vector gui? Thats cool, but the team that created Fl studio added that for free to their daw. New presets? Thats cool if you use them, I know many do not. New code mostly? Really? Not much to say here as new code should be a minimum when it comes to updates. The effects? they're all based off the same principles of other effects such as reverb, deley ect. Nothing ground breaking here imho (also i'm sure most are present in Fusor right now) New ui browser? Sure, if you have never used any other softsynth ever (Massive,Fm8,Zebra,Diva,Hive, I could go on) And the arp doesn't seem to me at least like it's much different than what Fusor has to offer(Not to mention how arps are becoming a standard part of many daws, I use fl's arp all the time) But I would agree that if you are going to make a bread and butter anything, that it should be done right. I believe you have succeeded at this no doubt, but it's nothing I would call boundary pushing. I believe that if you are going to price something it should be in line with what your competitors are doing as well. Serum to me is ground-breaking and it's priced at 189$ I believe , so for me to pay the same or more than 189$ for something, it better offer what Serum can do at the very least, or be so characterful in sound and it's architecture to warrant the price. However I'm sure I will be chastised for my opinion. I mean this will the most respect. i'm sure others will be happy to see the price is not higher.

[rustman]

I'll wait until all are finished and then evaluate based on a squad update package. I was sort of under the impression that the whole lot would be on the market last spring. I've got nothing negative to say about the choice of words used to describe the update. Parsing words is a wasteful pursuit, imho.

[jbuonacc]

so, does this mean that DCAM Synth Squad V1 will go up in "value" in the KVR market now that it's discontinued? (half serious.)

- per above, can V1 licenses still be sold/transferred?
- do people who purchased it second-hand qualify for the upgrade discount?
- do people who purchase it second/third/eighth-hand from here on out also qualify for the discount?


sorry to see how bad this is going so far. the new UI is fantastic!

[bmrzycki]

How much would you normally reckon to pay for 900 professional-quality presets alone?

That's a bit of a tough question to answer. It's really difficult to separate the value of included presets from a synth. What percentage of the value is the engine and what percentage is the sounds?

For the sake of argument let's assume 100% of the value comes from the patches and every patch is worth the same relative to each other. It's not true, but it helps a bit with comparisons on the overall software synth market.

Omnisphere 2 costs $479 USD and comes with 12,563 sounds. If we exclude taxes that's 479 / 12563 = 4 cents per sound.

Tone2 Electra2 comes with 1,200 presets and costs $189. That's $189 / 1200 = 16 cents a sound.

The Synthmaster Factory is $99 USD and comes with 1100 presets. That's $99 / 1100 = 9 cents a sound.

Alchemy 2 comes with Logic 10.2 and has 3100 presets. That's $199 / 3100 = 6 cents a sound. (It's even cheaper if you purchase Mainstage just to get Alchemy 2.)

u-he's Hive comes with 1,460 presets (excluding the Treasure trove which some are not made by professionals) and is priced at $149. That's $149 / 1460 = 10 cents a sound.

Strobe 2 comes with 900 sounds and costs $179. That's 179 / 900 = 20 cents a sound.

If we look at something a bit different, The Dark Zebra comes with 400 presets and costs $99. That's 99 / 400 = 25 cents a sound.

So if I look at the current competition I'd say those 900 sounds are worth a market rate somewhere between $36 (900 * 0.04) to $75 (900 * 0.16) USD depending on how well they are made and how many become famous sounds. Strobe's pricing is a little higher (but not excessively so) than that estimate. It costs more per sound than any of the other synths I listed but less than TDZ (something pretty unique in my opinion).

I'll let others be the judge of the value of those presets to them though.

[Angus_FX]

LOL, didn't expect that (but probably should have ) - so that values everything else in the upgrade at somewhere between $43 and $4. Think I can live with that...

I'll wait until all are finished and then evaluate based on a squad update package.

We're not doing an update package. It's fully a la carte now.

- per above, can V1 licenses still be sold/transferred?

Yes, unless the original owner has already taken advantage of the upgrade price. In that situation, you'd sell both together for one license transfer.

- do people who purchased it second-hand qualify for the upgrade discount?

Yes, certainly for the forseeable.

- do people who purchase it second/third/eighth-hand from here on out also qualify for the discount

Yes, until such time as that particular serial is used to upgrade. Each serial can only be used by one person to upgrade.

[Uncle E]

New code mostly? Really? Not much to say here as new code should be a minimum when it comes to updates.

May I ask how you feel about the upgrade price for Omnisphere 2? The degree to which Strobe 2 has been newly coded is equal to or more than what was done for Omnisphere 2.

[jbuonacc]

thanks, Angus. appreciate the info.

[emef]

parameter locks are proving really useful, great new feature

[marvotron]

got the serial from JRR now, so thanks to JRR for that
the morphing feature on Strobe 2 really is sick, getting some proper f**ked up sounds

If you think the sounds are fked up they must be mad

Gonna have to try the demo now even though I promised myself i'd hold back because I just bought my reaktor 6 upgrade..

[Pyrotek45]

New code mostly? Really? Not much to say here as new code should be a minimum when it comes to updates.

May I ask how you feel about the upgrade price for Omnisphere 2? The degree to which Strobe 2 has been newly coded is equal to or more than what was done for Omnisphere 2.

I don't use Omnisphere. It always seemed like an overpriced preset machine to me. So I can't say, as I have never been interested in that particular synth, ever.

[murnau]

If the price is to high for you nobody force you to upgrade or buy it full. There's a demo and everybody can decide if it's worth it or not. The dumbest thing one can do is to debate about a notion like "boundaries". How boring is that? Okay i get it.. you don't have the money to buy it and now you trying hard to create kind of fault you can blame the dev for in public? You come here and spoil the thread with that? Really?

PS: Omnisphere an "overpriced preset machine" ? Sorry.. WHAT??