Babylon 2

When I began writing this, with Babylon 2 still running on my DAW as I wrote, I gave this 2 stars and began writing an angry review about a product that seemed poor because as soon as I installed Babylon2, it immediately hard locked Cubase 14. My C14 install hasnt crashed once in 6+ months, so this was a surprise.

So I reloaded C14 and gave this another shot, and played with it for an hour or so. My initial thoughts were "ohhhh, brother. Here is ANOTHER analogy sounding, "classic" sounding throwaway synth that I have no use or attention span for."

Then, as I played more and more presets, skipping past some of the boring presets at the very top of the list, I began to hear a sound signature that my ears began to like. Does it have many layers? Many interesting oscillator types? No. Its 3 oscillators + a noise generator, a filter, a few basic effects that sounds pretty basic, but it has a tone that my ear genuinely likes, over other cheaper, simpler synths in a similar category. There is a... warmth, purity, and cleanliness that I appreciate, and even with 8-10 note polyphony, it "rings" clearly in my ears like a high fidelity signal instead of a dirty, aliased dime-a-dozen analog emulator.

I like this synth. It has not crashed Cubase again in 3 hours now, so this is good. If it kills Cubase again I will update this review with that info, but In the end I gave this 4 stars for audio quality. 1 star removed for limited oscillator types and narrow sonic character and things like 5 clap sounds that are identical, but its overall a good SOUNDING synth imo.