Product Reviews by KVR Members

This is a serious disappointment. It was an instant upgrade for me when I saw it in the store - I love Trash 2 so much.

But...It doesn't distort as hard as Trash 2. There's no compressor module. There's no delay module. There's no pre and post filtering. The number of filters has been cut back to one. No EQ.

And worst of all? They removed the custom wave shaping that made Trash 2 special.

Not to mention the "new improved interface" can't be resized. In 2024.

This does have some nice new features, The X-Y pads are a nice touch. You can customize across frequency bands. There's a new convolve module. And finally there's an auto-gain feature, which is nice given how many times I feared for my speakers with Trash 2.

All said, though, despite the nice additions Trash 2 was better than Trash 3 is.

It's useable, but sadly, given its heritage, there are better distortion plugins out there.

I've had this just long enough to get a good feel for it, so I thought I'd give my thoughts.

First, this has excellent sounds. They sound natural, not thin, and they fit into a mix well with the softsynths I use (Harmor, Sytrus, Crystal, and most of the NI products). There's an excellent, though imperfect, variety. Though this won't replace most special purpose packages, it will serve as an excellent place holder until you are sure you need them. And, at least in my case, most of the time I expect I won't.

Second, as someone who owns Total Studio 3, and hence lots of sampler-ish synths from IK, I find it quite nice that I'm able to import them all into one interface. In my perfect world I'd be able to categorize every sound sample and I own in a more user-friendly version of something like Massive's interface, and be able to choose from all the sounds of one type from a central resource. This can't do that, but it does move in that direction.

As a final thought on the positive side, the interface of ST3 is incredibly much improved from previous versions. The ST2 XL interface was painfully tiny on my 24" 1080p monitor, and god help anyone who tried to view it on a laptop screen with even higher resolution. ST3 is neat, clean, and quite readable. Enough so I'm betting even on a 17" 2560x1600 resolution laptop it would still be usable.

The MIDI seems clumsy in many ways, and I wish it could be polished. And I wish it supported sf2 and sfz files. That doesn't seem like too much to ask. Or nki files, which *is* too much to ask. ;)

Oh, and it's 64-bit only. I use a 32-bit DAW, so I have to use it bridged. Not the biggest problem in the world, but a minor annoyance.

I got this for $99, and it was a steal at that price. In a world where you can get Komplete for $400, however, I'm pretty skeptical about the fact full retail is $350. But if you can get it as an upgrade, or on sale, definitely go for it.