Adventus

The main feature of this synthesizer is its sound: it has a VA sound that immediately gets your attention. Quality oscillators and filters and outstanding on-board effects combine to create a very nice-sounding synth.

User Interface:
Colorful and full of controls to play around with, the GUI is very nice. The knobs, for some reason, require you to make two revolutions with your mouse to get one revolution out of the knob. Aside from this minor issue, the interface is excellent.

Sound:
If you like fat analog sounds, you'll like Adventus. It is definitely best suited for dance music, but it has some very nice pads and strings, also. And there's no telling what you'll be able to get it to do if you're willing to learn how to operate it.

Features:
For less than thirty dollars, it's amazing how many features this thing has. Clicking on the buttons brings up five pages of controls for them all.

Documentation:
None, unfortunately, but the developer does have a forum in which you can ask for help.

Presets:
For such an excellent synthesizer, it's a shame that there aren't more presets available. It's capable of much more than what is represented in the default patches. These are very well-done, to be sure, but most are trance leads and basses. Including, say, 200 additional quality, varied presets would bring Adventus to an entirely new level; on par with some much more expensive synths.

Customer Support:
While not the greatest, customer support is available and your questions/concerns will be addressed.

Value For Money:
This is very well worth the cost.

Stability:
Takes a while to load, and, at least in my VST host, I need to access the GUI before I get any sound out of it (unlike other synths). The other problem is that, depending on the preset and the polyphony, this synth can easily overwhelm your CPU. With that said, it has never "crashed" on me.

I would highly recommend this synthesizer to 1) anyone who appreciates a good VA sound, who 2) has at least a moderately powerful CPU, 3) doesn't already own a commercial VA synth, and 4) doesn't want to spend a small fortune on one. If you meet these four criteria, the Adventus is definitely for you.

NOTE: Adventus 1.5 has come out since my review, and an Arpeggiator was added to sweeten the deal. Again, this fortifies it as a top choice for an "open-it-and-go" Techno synth.

This was one of two synths this year that within minutes of playing them I knew that I had to have. Immediately I was struck by its professional, colourful interface - reminiscent of a Juno crossed with an ARP - and its warm, large sounds.

The UI is very easy to read, with pleasing 3-D art for knobs, LED's, etc. One of the more novel things about Adventus is that it splits up its effects, LFO's and Options into different "pages" of the main UI; click the "FX" button and you get large displays to tweak the FX, which are very high-quality and have lots of parameters. I like how the delay has HPF and LPF controls, for instance - not often seen on onboard synth FX.

The filters are really high quality as well. These are the kinds of filters you want when doing slow filtersweeps, without getting annoying spikes and distortion, very impressive for a synth at this price.

You can get some cool FX with its two LFO's that have complex, assignable source-destination mapping. There are lots of possibilities there that I look forward to exploring.

And ultimately, this all gives you sounds that feel like they've been plucked straight out of your favourite electronic records. The well-programmed Presets leap out at you and, while I'm sure some purists would object to that much effect on a patch, the patches also sound good dry. The overall tone reminds me of early 80's synths such as Roland Juno/Jupiter or PPG Wave, with full bottom and bright highs. I can load several of these and still make out the individual instruments - despite all the FX - and it held up well in mono.

I assume because the author recognized that this could be the one and only synth needed to make electronic music, he made a "lite" version, included with the normal version, that has no FX and fewer internal connections. This is perfect if you just need a simple bassline, or if you need lots of instances (which you will!) or if you need to squeeze in that one more synth in your tune.

The only downside (as of this writing) was that I found it took unusually long to load up several instances in Cubase, I had to open the GUI to get playback from a MIDI track upon re-opening a comp, I'm not crazy about the knob movement where it seems you have to use very exaggerated circular movements to maintain sweeps, and there is no documentation yet (but it is very easy to use).

This is the best low-cost synth I've come across PERIOD. I was shocked that firstly, this was made with Synthedit and, secondly, that this cost only $30. With a focus on ready-to-go presets, I advise anyone who needs an all-in-one techno/trance/electronica workhorse to look no further. For all you users constantly inquiring about "that fat sound", get the demo today and I guarantee you'll be composing with it in no time.