Product Reviews by KVR Members

Color me impressed.

Markus Feil and his team have done an excellent job with this synth! There's very little I don't like about it, and all those things are only slight niggles, like the absence of what's becoming an industry standard practice lately, right-clicking for MIDI learn. What's really important is there: THE SOUND.

How does it sound? Completely badass, that's how! It has a deceptively simple layout, but the signal can be radically modulated, even within the oscillator section. The filters are very powerful and sound as juicy and rubbery as you like, or as clinical and precise as you need them to. There are many different types, and all I've tried so far leave nothing to be desired. The new Moog filter is outstanding, and the fractal filters, though pretty bizarre, can allow for some really original, noisy, nasty sounds. Dubstep kids will have a blast with these!

The oscillator section is simply superb. There's a lot here, and I won't go into all the details, but I've not yet found an easier to use Wavetable implementation in a very long time. I'm very, very happy to have a synth with powerful wavetable capabilities that doesn't live in hardware. It's about time! I can't wait to hear the wavetables that get added in future updates. The stock ones are already incredibly useful, but I'd like to hear lots of morphing, twisting, stretching ones. The more the merrier! All the other oscillator types, including sample players, are pretty wicked. I'm really excited to see where all this goes in the future. The purity and power of these sources is astonishing... no aliasing or digital fluffiness anywhere to be found!

This synth is a dream to program once you understand the basics. You can whip out fantastic-sounding patches one after the other once you know your way around. Saving is not a hassle and is very straightforward. Creating a new patch is made easy with several useful templates on hand.

The effects, though often not complicated, generally sound superb. The reverbs seem especially tuned to synth sounds right out of the box so you don't have to go tweaking. The modulation effects sound very rich and sweet. The delays are quite flexible, and everything else generally does its job with aplomb. No complaints!

All around, this is a fantastic-sounding synthesizer, and the various Output modes, such as Psychoacoustic, are really the icing on the cake. There are very few, if any, soft synths currently available that are capable of sounding this rich and powerful with so little tweaking. I have many, and I love a lot of them, but this just makes everything so simple... everything's laid out sensibly, and I can go about as fast as I can think. Brilliant!

Now, if they'd just let me MIDI learn knobs without accidentally sending me to their website every other time...

Zebra 2.5 is an unbelievably powerful synth. This, Camel's brilliant 'Alchemy', and the bread-&-butter 'Sylenth 1' are becoming my go-to instruments lately.

As for Zebra, this is a semi-modular synthesizer with a unique grid that makes routing and keeping track of your modules very easy indeed! No messy, animated cables to get in the way. This is a very modern, futuristic take on synthesis--it's its own beast, not emulating anything, a truly novel instrument.

The sound? Well, to say it's bloody amazing wouldn't really nearly do it justice.

If you're a preset-maven, go elsewhere. Nothing to see here. Not to say some of the presets aren't very good; they are. But, buying this synth for the presets is like buying a Ferrari for the cup holders.

This is a programmers dream--once you LEARN it, it's freakin' DANGEROUS! The comb filters and oscillators alone are just so amazingly powerful, I really don't know where to start. There's just too much to talk about, far more than would fit here. From the oscillator effects (that's right: you can add preset effects to the oscillators themselves, and with unreal results), to the brilliant, brash, and fantastic-sounding comb filters, you'll be in synth heaven for days, nay, months, before you even get a handle on what this thing can really do! And don't even get me started on the filters--Urs Heckmann is a genius. This much is totally obvious.

Let me put it to you straight: you're much, MUCH better off having a lone ACTUAL GENIUS devoloping your soft synths than a whole army of 9-to-5ers who must all coordinate with one another and STILL can't get it quite right.

But, with this one you've REALLY got to get your hands dirty... putzing around with a few presets here and there will tell you NOTHING. Nada. If you buy this synth to fiddle with some presets, I feel bad for you, I really do! Just bite the bullet and RTFM: it's online, it's easy, it makes sense. You'll thank yourself a thousand times over once you get how easy and powerful this thing is.

Wow.

I'm still shaken and disturbed by the fact that this synth even exists in software form.

IT'S BLOODY AMAZING.

And, it'll only get better.

Lennard Addink has got to be one of the very best DSP programmers in the world. This is a rich, RICH piece of software. The sound quality is just absolutely top notch, and this coming from a long time Virus user. I prefer this over my Virus Rack XL, BECAUSE MY VIRUS RACK XL DIED... long, slow, and painfully. The sounds it made in its last throes should have been sampled. This is something I will forever regret. They were unbelievably, hysterically, awful. You people would have died laughing. I'm not kidding. I wish I had them. Anyway -

Now, I have a brick. A $1350, pretty black, beknobbled brick. Thanks, Access.

BUT! Though it's not as feature laden, the sound quality of Sylenth1 is at least on par with the famous German hardware offering. I'm still just shocked and amazed that one guy in the Netherlands did this all by himself. And, considering the CPU cost, this is work of brilliance beyond mere mortal comprehension. While other companies will spend years developing a single filter that costs 20% of a respectable modern CPU under normal use ALONE, Mr. Addink gives you everything you could reasonably ask for in a software VA for, oh, around 5-7% under normal (i.e. completely INSANE) usage.

If he were to create a truly feature-rich version of this synth, including true PWM, wavetables, etc., he could easily become a rich man. This is THE bread-&-butter VA soft synth to have, in case you were wondering.

Though this synth certainly can't do everything, for what it DOES do, it shines like no other. Absolutely stellar, and absolutely BEYOND worth what I paid. I cannot gripe that I pre-empted the group buy by two weeks. I am happy, and I feel no buyer's remorse, even though, had I waited, i could have purchased it for half of what I paid.

In case this doesn't make sense to you yet, in case you like electronic music or makin' beats, or whatever the hell it is you do with your studio when you just don't wanna be bothered by the world outside and you need to get lost in an evening of digital tweakage, let me state it plainly:

THIS IS *THE* SOFTSYNTH TO HAVE in 2009. This and VOPM, if you like/know FM. :)