Largo

I've always been a bit of a Waldorf fan, who aren't, so i downed the demo of Largo, played around, found some great synth presets, and was sold. I bought it shortly after, full of joy and ready to play with my new toy, i unlocked the fancy synth and tweaked like hell, and from that point on, all the flaws came to the surface.

The sound is trying so hard to sound clear, that it most of the times sounds thin, and when you fiddle with EQs and stuff to calm it down, it sounds muddy and dumbly. In the pro side of the story most be the great widening unison, which raises it all up again.

I really love the possibilities to make wide bass sounds perfect for Electro and House things, but it gets hard to pick Largo from the synth pool when you get reminded by it's all so terrible tired interface, everything is slow, and it's killing your creativity. The arp feature is great, but not when you move the mouse and have to wait few ms for the slider or knob to follow your strokes.

It's packed with presets, a lot sounds good, but never really good enough, only few really stands out, and those are hard to find, as the browser really is not what a browser should be, and thats easy to use. There's no way other than searching for the word "bass" to find the bass presets, and the main preset browsing window is a big bucket of weird words with only few hints of what you could expect to hear.

Yeah, i know i sound a bit grumpy, but i am also a bit disappointed, but enough about that, lets look on all the good things.

3 OSC with a lot of waves to choose from and good balancing between them. Two great Waldorf approved filters, even though i suspect them to be the reason for the kinda harsh sound of largo (ups, i did it again), but they too have nice features like drive and nice envelope control.

The effect section is great, if the unison fails, the chorus will do the job, and it has to effect slots to fill, so when you realize that the reverb is useless, there's room enough for the sweat overdrive.

I guess Waldorf somehow made the perfect sound designable synth, the matrix section opens a world wide of options, and that leads me to the final words. Largo is great for synth geeks happy to use more than the normal amount of time on tweaking, but Largo is not for preset riders and producers who hate all too digitally sounding synths.Read Review