KVR Audio

ionekvr · Post by **ionekvr** » Wed Jul 04, 2018 5:13 pm

Pondering to buy VPS Avenger, Serum, or UVI Falcon shortly... I'm seriously on the fence, it's driving me crazy. I don't need or want to buy all three. Can someone help me one way or another? I'm seriously impressed with VPS Avenger, especially with the continued updates to the engine. Very promising. I mainly do cinematic, electronic and sound design for film, but I want another flavor in my toolset, and I have many other great softsynths and tons of libraries. Stability and sound quality are super important to me. And I need something unique and inspiring to try new things with. And those three -- VPS Avenger, Serum, and UVI Falcon -- are the most attractive right now. Any thoughts/help much appreciated!

5Lives · Post by **5Lives** » Wed Jul 04, 2018 5:27 pm

ionekvr wrote:Pondering to buy VPS Avenger, Serum, or UVI Falcon shortly... I'm seriously on the fence, it's driving me crazy. I don't need or want to buy all three. Can someone help me one way or another? I'm seriously impressed with VPS Avenger, especially with the continued updates to the engine. Very promising. I mainly do cinematic, electronic and sound design for film, but I want another flavor in my toolset, and I have many other great softsynths and tons of libraries. Stability and sound quality are super important to me. And I need something unique and inspiring to try new things with. And those three -- VPS Avenger, Serum, and UVI Falcon -- are the most attractive right now. Any thoughts/help much appreciated!

I just went through this - and bought Avenger. It is incredibly full featured, BUT quite easy to dive in and tweak or program from scratch. Falcon, while very powerful as well, is also just as complicated to wrap your head around (in my opinion at least) and the workflow isn't ideal. Avenger is much more immediate - and has incredible presets and expansions. Serum is a solid synth - great sound and a variety of wavetables, but it is quite limited compared to Avenger (no granular, no multi-samples, no drums, no arp, single filter, etc). I own Serum but do feel now that Avenger could replace it.

Hope that helps with your decision. Avenger has a demo so you should try it out!

ionekvr · Post by **ionekvr** » Wed Jul 04, 2018 5:48 pm

Thank you for your thoughts! How stable do you feel it is now? When it first came out, I read of various issues -- too many for my situation to count on -- but now it's had many updates, do you feel it is really solid? And how responsive and committed do you feel the developers are?

Hanz Meyzer · Post by **Hanz Meyzer** » Wed Jul 04, 2018 6:35 pm

Rene is pretty kind and answers pretty quickly. On my macos machines, Avenger still is a crash fest, though. Songs crash commonly while using Avenger, and only with Avenger. And performance wise there are heavy bottlenecks in voice management, at least for some synthesis types. So it turns out that running only a bunch of instances will lead into constant crackles at voice start, even if the cpu meter says 30% (so it actually acts like it was denormal numbers, which is not the cause, as Rene explained to me). There are heavy peaks in the voice manager. The devs seem to think that this is an acceptable behaviour from a softsynth. It also seems like these performance issues do not appear that drastically on the same machine on Windows. If those two problems were addressed, Avenger would be pretty perfect.

sircuit · Post by **sircuit** » Wed Jul 04, 2018 6:38 pm

For cinematic Falcon blows Avenger out of the water. The granular engine in Falcon is top notch (Avenger’s is quite rudimentary), the sample playback algos are extremely advanced (again, Avenger lacks in this department), lots of oscillator types, proper oversampled distortion types, way more effects overall, flexible routing, powerful midi editing (scriping and midi effects).
In Falcon you can build templates (basically you build your own synth/sampler) with mapped macros and start from there instead of an empty patch. Also memory footprint is in favour of Falcon by a long shot (you can run dozens of Falcon instances without exhausting system memory while Avenger seems like is taking hundreds of MB with each instance). And RoundRobin in Falcon at both sample and OSC level... Falcon vs Avenger is like comparing Avenger vs Sylenth - each have it’s own place but it really depends on what you want from the synth.

jmg8 · Post by **jmg8** » Wed Jul 04, 2018 7:04 pm

First I use Windows and Avenger has not crashed on me ever, not even once.

I own all three synths (Serum, Avenger and Falcon)
I am a professional sound designer.

I must be one of the only people in the world who thinks Serum is shit. I use it sometimes for the wavetable editor, but that is all it has that is great. Everything else is just extremely limited in comparison to the other 2.

So that leaves Avenger vs Falcon.

Falcon is more flexible and has better sounding generators. However, the workflow is terrible.
If I know exactly what I want to do and it is complex, I will reach for Falcon. However, I rarely come up with much good when just noodling around, as it is quite unintuitive

Avenger is a little more basic than Falcon. However, the workflow is fantastic, really super fast. The presets and baked in modulation mappings make it loads of fun and I rarely loose creativity when using it.

If I remember Falcon is like twice the price, but it is not twice as good.

I would recommend that you buy Avenger, it is my most used synth and I own a LOT. Hope this helps. Feel free to ask any specifics

Bansaw · Post by **Bansaw** » Wed Jul 04, 2018 7:17 pm

jmg8 wrote:The presets and baked in modulation mappings make it loads of fun and I rarely loose creativity when using it.
I would recommend that you buy Avenger...

+1. Avenger is enjoyable, quite intuitive and easy to pick up.
I have windows, and its "rarely" crashed.
The developers are still adding functionality and updates are free.

noiseboyuk · Post by **noiseboyuk** » Wed Jul 04, 2018 7:35 pm

Never crashed for me in Windows / Cubase either. Agree with all the comments about how quick to use it is, my favourite synth to program.

RobinWood · Post by **RobinWood** » Wed Jul 04, 2018 7:42 pm

Of course the people in this thread will advise you to buy avenger, it's biased

I can say it crashes regularly here (windows7) or doesn't draw anything in the editor window

It consume lots of cpu and gpu. And sometimes out of the sudden there is this massive noise burst occuring every now and then...

The preset tagging and browsing is nice as well as the mod matrix. But I dislike it tries to do anything and everything. It just can't compete to synths dedicated to specific tasks or engines.

I notice the more features they build into it the more bloated the interface gets. Just a matter of time until all the space is used

Mr D · Post by **Mr D** » Wed Jul 04, 2018 7:56 pm

jmg8 wrote:
I must be one of the only people in the world who thinks Serum is shit.

"Shit" is perhaps a tad strong, but i agree after you've got used to Avenger, Serum just feels pretty ordinary and limited.

And the fact that you can now freely edit the modulation curves in Avenger, means it has moved into territory where other synths simply can't follow.

ionekvr · Post by **ionekvr** » Wed Jul 04, 2018 8:01 pm

RobinWood wrote:Of course the people in this thread will advise you to buy avenger, it's biased

I was definitely going to take that into consideration.

Sometimes threads like these are the perfect place to find honest answers from actual users though... and I do note that at least 2 people have suggested buying something else, and several have mentioned crashes... so the responses seem very helpful so far, but it's honestly not super inspiring to hear about the crashing, I hate to say.

Stability is so important to me.

But so is workflow -- Avenger looks like a fantastic sound designer's workstation/softsynth. Right now I use HALion 6 (among others) for a some sound design, but I think Avenger has a much better workflow. HALion 6 is very stable, though. Falcon's workflow looks just as messy or even more than HALion... and as for Serum, every time I am about to pull the trigger, I decide not to. Not sure why. But the workflow in Serum also looks good.

Anyway, thank you guys for all your input! I don't mean to distract from this thread, but I thought it would be a great place to find real users who were over the hype by now. Any other comments are appreciated! Still definitely considering Avenger, but several comments of crashing concern me TBH.

Xenox.AFL · Post by **Xenox.AFL** » Wed Jul 04, 2018 8:03 pm

You must remember that SERUM was released some years ago.. At the time Steve worked on this plugin, a lot of features were never be done in other synths before... I was still blowing away at this time (if i remember right, it was in 2011) when i made the factory presets.... But you are right on the other side, i still missed some things as i made the factory presets, things which were in all synths like a Arpeggiator just to name a thing i miss a lot (or sequencer)...

Avenger is for me the VST 2.0 ! It has everything and more i need, the GUI is very good and you can work very fast with it... Someone said it's crashing on the mac, yes, that's true, i have the same problem, when i close Logic it always crashed but crashes during my session is not that often...

Frank

ilalin · Post by **ilalin** » Wed Jul 04, 2018 8:24 pm

Unfortunately, even though the workflow, sound, features and expansions are amazing Avenger is still not rock solid on Win10 64 bit in Studio One 4 Pro. It does crash from time to time and the issues with the number of voices persist.
I'd wait...

5Lives · Post by **5Lives** » Wed Jul 04, 2018 9:00 pm

I've only been playing with Avenger in Ableton 10 on OS X High Sierra, but so far, so good. No crashes or anything. Still very early though and haven't used it in a heavy session.

Mr D · Post by **Mr D** » Wed Jul 04, 2018 9:12 pm

Very few crashes or bugs in Cubase 9.5, Windows 8.1.

Vengeance Producer Suite - AVENGER - 1.8.5 the main thread