Quote:
Originally Posted by TweakHead
The main difference, as far as sound design is concerned, is that with a super saw like oscillator, you're generating the voices at the oscillator level, while unison duplicates the entire signal
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I know you might be speaking about the Virus specifically but wanted to add the actual implementation of unison can vary quite a bit across different synthesizers. DUNE2 for example (DUNE is acronym for differential unison engine) treats each unison voice separately with different sound parameters for each (or you can treat all voices as one if you want). This is one of the things I love about high-end soft synths, because a typical Core i7 or whatever is so much more powerful than typical hardware DSPs, they plugin can give you the freedom to really go nuts and push limits even if it ends up using up 50% of your CPU -- that kind of CPU usage is really limiting but you of course can freeze it or sample it, which is still better than stolen notes IMO.
I believe in the case of the Ultranova, unison is basically giving you a full oscillator with each voice (a complete representation of the osc signal or waveform), but with detune/detune density it's programmatically making "lesser copies" of the signal which are actually thinner / lower fidelity versions of the signal (which, when stacked together of course give a similar effect). Think along the lines of something like synths that give you quality options (eco/draft mode for the sound) to help manage CPU resources. For example your ear can hear the difference between eco mode and best quality mode on most synths, but in a mix and after run through other effects it would be harder to notice on most sounds in most music types. The Ultranova printed manual actually makes a specific point that most of the factory patches use detune density (hypersaw trick) instead of true unison.